The Register had a quick chat with Samsung about the Z-SSD they announced at FMS 2016, hoping to get some details from the company about the technology behind the new product, with little success. We know it will be DRAM-NAND gap-filler such as the one Netlist announced earlier and will be possible competition for Intel's XPoint. Samsung did confirm that it will be NVMe and will initially launch as a half height, half length PCIe card, with other interfaces to follow. They did admit it will use 3D V-NAND, but would only hint at the custom circuit design they will use. The Register offers some prognostication at the end of the quick interview, you can see that right here.
"The mysterious Samsung Z-SSD was announced at the Flash Memory Summit, and positioned as a DRAM-NAND gap-filler. This makes it competition for XPoint. We asked Samsung about it, and here is what we learnt."
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How is it a DRAM-NAND
How is it a DRAM-NAND gap-filler if it still uses NAND?
Exactly.
Maybe they’re going
Exactly.
Maybe they’re going to try to go with a new PCIe NVMe design that competes by being close enough on performance and a lower price. I could see them doing marketing with comparisons to SATA drives instead of other NVMe drives.
Current fastest flash based
Current fastest flash based SSDs use DRAM with supercapacitors for caching, or in the case of Mangstor’s NVMe SSD, it uses STT-MRAM and DRAM caching.
Perhaps Samsung is using a similar approach and saying its new tech?
The Register has a little
The Register has a little more technical detail — looks like the latency of this memory is closer to current Optane speeds (only 2x slower) than traditional NAND.
It sounds like this is still a ‘block device’ though and not a ‘bit’ device like DRAM (or Optane).
It probably is fast enough you won’t see a real difference between this and Optane on a PCI-E 3.0 x4 setup. I don’t think Optane will show itself to be appreciably faster until it’s on the DIMM slot..
Don’t forget Micron’s QuantX
Don’t forget Micron’s QuantX brand of XPoint, as there is that to compete with Intel’s Optane(XPoint)! Micron should have used a different Branding as the QuantX(XPoint) brand name is also used under QuantX™(syringe barrels).
Micron needs to get their QuantX name out there, as a recent article at ARS Ars Technica failed to even mention that Intel’s Optine even has a competitor.
It’s an easy way to tell if a so called “Objective” article is actually a sponsored article when for example the ARS story’s author fails to mention even one competitive to Optane product, especially for XPoint that has only 2 original creators(Intel/Micron). There is no objective article when the story’s author fails to mention by name the maker of any competitive product.
I wonder if they have
I wonder if they have implemented some kind of NOR type flash cell rather than a NAND type flash cell, or just some unique design made possible by the 3D structure. I don’t know that much about the actual transistor level structure, but as far as I know, NOR offers byte addressability and lower read latencies. It has higher write latencies though, and takes more power. That could be countered by using a large DRAM write cache. NOR is supposed to be less dense due to parallel connection rather than serial, but I wonder if different designs are possible due to vertical flash cells. I was just thinking that having the flash cell on the 3D structure may allow them to add more circuitry in between the cells without changing the distance between the cells much.