Summary
DRAM companies will see faltering growth. OEMs with NAND strategies will prosper while others will lag behind. NAND companies are poised to tap into PC market growth.
Analysis
On November 13th flash card maker SanDisk announced the Vaulter Disk, a NAND flash based PCI Express module which the company says “tag-teams with the hard drive to provide enhanced performance.” Similar to Intel’s proprietary Turbo Memory modules (formerly known as Robson) the 8-16GB Vaulter device harnesses the speed of embedded flash memory for frequently-accessed files while continuing to use a standard hard drive for bulk storage of less frequently accessed data. Vaulter Disk will debut at CES (Jan. 7-10) in Las Vegas.Our Objective Analysis
Our Objective Analysis
Ten years from now we will look at PC and server memory architectures from 1981 to 2007 and say: “Did we really do that?” It will seem odd to us that the entire main memory of systems was made of DRAM.
This is not the first such change to main memories – roll the clock back to the 1970s and early 1980s and you see computers using SRAM as main memory. That seems unbelievable today, with DRAM dominating main memory and SRAM relegated to “small” 2MB on-processor caches that, incidentally, are 4,000 times larger than some of those SRAM PC main memories of yesteryear.
Today, NAND flash is poised to roar into the PC market, and it’s not coming in the form of SSDs. In fact, SanDisk’s Vaulter Disk and Intel’s Turbo Memory even challenge the need for hybrid HDDs. Compared to HDDs, NAND flash is an extraordinarily expensive form of storage which should maintain its current 20:1 cost/GB ratio with HDD for the foreseeable future. But although it’s costly, NAND is also fast so it fits well within the memory hierarchy of computing platforms.
Why now? What has changed over the last year or two to make NAND more attractive for PCs than it has been in the past? Well, NAND crossed over DRAM’s price per gigabyte in 2005, and is cascading down the cost curve at a rate that is causing the DRAM/NAND price ratio to double from today’s 3:1 to 6:1 by 2013.
Now NAND may not be as fast as DRAM, but it’s significantly cheaper. On the other hand NAND is more costly than HDD, but it is also faster. This is exactly the argument that makes any memory fit into the memory hierarchy: Faster than the downstream technology but cheaper than the upstream.
By 2013 we expect for users or OEMs to look at their memory budget and observe: “For $100 I could either buy 75GB of DRAM or 450GB of NAND.” With this in mind, they are likely to refer to some benchmark to determine which should get them a bigger performance boost, and go with that solution. In many or even most cases, that solution is quite likely to be NAND.
Where does this leave DRAM? While we expect to see the average size of DRAM in PCs continue to grow, this growth will slow eventually. Historically this growth rate has averaged 45% per annum. In the future the growth rate could slow to something like 10%. As a result, the DRAM market, whose gigabyte growth has recently slowed from its historical average of 75% down to around 55%, will see further slowing to something in the 20-30% range, driving continued consolidation in this business, and forcing most participants to adopt a flash strategy.
DRAM will follow the path of SRAM, becoming the smaller faster expensive bit of memory that augments the speed of the larger NAND memory. Although today only two companies (Intel and SanDisk) offer such solutions, we expect flash-based memory topologies to become widespread over time.
Companies that will be impacted by this change will be all NAND flash makers (Samsung, Toshiba, Intel, Micron, Intel, STMicroelectronics, and Renesas), DRAM makers (Elpida, Qimonda, Powerchip, Winbond, and Etron), and all those in the SSD market (including SanDisk, STEC, SMART Modular, Adtron, Mtron, SiliconSystems, BiTMICRO Networks, Targa Systems, Apacer, Transcend Information, Power Quotient International (PQI), Super Talent Technology AKA Ma Labs), Advanced Media (Ritek), Hagiwara Sys-Com, Delkin Devices, Texas Memory, Solid Data Systems, and many more.)
