Intel and Micron have just announced an industry first. Together they’ve created a 128 gigabit NAND chip made using a 20 nanometer process. What exactly does that mean? The memory technology used in smartphones, tablets, and solid state hard drives, and we’re talking about storage here, not random access memory or RAM, depends on NAND chips. Until today the largest NAND chip on the market could store just 64 gigabits of data, better known as 8 gigabytes. Manufactures typically stack NAND chips on top of each other to get additional storage. Intel says that you’ll be able to stack 8 of these 128 gigabit chips, thereby giving you 128 GB of storage. They also say that mass production of these high capacity NAND chips will begin during the first half of 2012, though we’ll likely have to wait until 2013 to actually see them in devices.
Besides capacity though, Intel’s new NAND chips are also fast. The Open NAND Flash Interface Working Group, or ONFi, sets the standards that all NAND chips use so that the industry can easily interchange parts. Version 2.0 of the ONFi spec, which just about everything on the market today uses, has a maximum speed limit of 200 megatransfers per second (MT/s). These new 128 Gb chips use ONFi version 3.0, which bumps that up to 333 MT/s. What exactly does that mean? According to AnandTech:
“This has a direct impact on sequential read performance for example, as most of those operations tend to be interface bound. Note that when I’m talking about interface speed I’m referring to the maximum speed allowed between the SSD controller and the NAND itself (e.g. an 8-channel ONFI 3 controller would have 8 x 333MT/s interfaces to NAND).”
We’re pretty confident in saying that Apple’s going to finally introduce a flash based device, be it an iPod touch, iPad, or even iPhone, with more than 100 GB of storage at some point in 2013. This year they introduced the 64 GB iPhone, and the 64 GB iPod touch is now 2 years old, so it makes sense.