Samsung and Seagate announced a broad strategic alignment today under which Samsung has transferred its hard disk drive operations to Seagate for an estimated $1.375 billion. Included in the agreement, in addition to extensive cross-licensing of existing patents, is a supply agreement under which Samsung will provide semiconductor memory for Seagate’s NAND Enterprise SSD, solid state hybrid drives, and other products.
This alignment reflects a general theme that we—along with Samsung and other observers of memory technologies—have supported for some time.
The general cost and performance guidelines under which memory technologies have developed in the past are now shifting. OEMs and the semiconductor industry are very familiar with the computing memory hierarchy in which the price and performance expectations for memory technologies have been based on the architectural proximity of the memory technology to the processing element. The driving element of this equation was the ability to keep the processing element as busy as possible, and the primary elements of cost/bit versus memory access time defined the values of the associated memory technologies. In terms of performance and cost-per-bit, the traditional top-to-bottom memory hierarchy cost/performance ratio ranked from SRAM, DRAM, non-volatile semiconductor memory, to hard disk drive.
There are two elements that have shifted relative to the original hierarchy. One element is the shift toward mobile computing applications, which naturally elevates the value of non-volatile memory technologies.
The second shift is the massive increase in the amount of data that is being created, transported, and stored, as Samsung and others have pointed out at numerous conferences. The resulting pressure on the computing infrastructure exerted by this increasing data load is causing multiple stress cracks in the traditional computing memory hierarchy. The requirements for lower power consumption and lower heat generation lead to the first major crack, which was the substitution of NAND for DRAM in server applications. That crack has now broadened with the Samsung/Seagate joint participation in Enterprise SSD semiconductor memory products.
We expect that future stress cracks at this and other levels in the traditional computing memory hierarchy will continue to create market entry points for other new memory solutions.
www.convergentsemiconductors.com - Global Analysis of Memory Strategies and Issues
