Ten Year Anniversary of Core 2 Duo and Conroe: Moore’s Law is Dead, Long Live Moore’s Law
by Ian Cutress on July 27, 2016 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core 2 Duo
- Conroe
- ITRS
- Nostalgia
- Time To Upgrade
Looking To The Future: NAND Flash Scales Up to 64 TB SSDs in 2030
Over the past few years, the NAND Flash industry has gone through two major shifts in technology: the movement from 1 to 2 to 3 bits per cell, which directly increases bit density and capacity, and also moving from planar flash to variants of 3D stacking. Stacking can refer to individual NAND dies, as well as stacking those dies into a single package: both of these features are being extensively investigated to increase density also. There are two main drivers for this: reduction in cost, and capacity. However, despite this, the predictions in the ITRS report for NAND flash are primarily looking at improvements to numbers of layers rather than lithography changes or moving to more bits per cell.
As we can see, TLC (according to the report) is here to stay. QLC, or whatever you want to call it, is not mentioned. The two changes are the number of memory layers, moving from 32 today to 128 around 2022 and then 256/512 by 2030, and the number of word-lines in one 3D NAND string. This gives a product density projection of 256 Gbit packages today to 1 Tbit packages in 2022 and 4 Tbit packages in 2030.
If we apply this to consumer drives available today, we can extrapolate potential SSD sizes for the future. The current Samsung 850 EVO 4 TB uses Samsung’s 48-layer third generation V-NAND to provide 256 Gbit TLC parts. Alongside the 4 TB of memory, the controller requires 4 GB of DRAM, which is another concern to remember. So despite the report stating 256 Gbit in 32-layer, we have 256 Gbit in 48-layer, which is a difference primarily in die-size predictions for the report. Still, if we go off of the product density we should see 12 TB SSDs by 2020, 16 TB in 2022, 48 TB in 2028 and 64 TB drives in 2030. It’s worth noting that the ITRS report doesn’t mention power consumption in this table, nor controller developments which may be a substantial source of performance and/or capacity implementations.
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fanofanand - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
Ian, your reviews are always too notch. You have incredible knowledge, and your understanding of both CPU and memory architecture etc is unparalleled in journalism. Ignore the trolls, this was a fantastic article.extide - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
Different editors for different content. Honestly I thought this was a great piece. I think this site is not quite up to what it was back then, just go read the articles for Fermi, or when Bulldozer released and stuff, much more deep dives into the architecture. I realize that Intel and the other manufacturers may not always be willing to release much info, and they seem to release less these days but I don't know -- the site feels different.Honestly, and I am pretty forgiving, being as late as this site has on the recent GPU reviews is pretty inexcusable. Although, that is obviously nothing to do with Ian, I always like Ian's articles.
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
Thanks! :)fanofanand - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
The Pascal review was pretty damn deep, not sure how much farther you expect them to dive. That said, it was very, very late.Michael Bay - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
ADHD millennial detected.Notmyusualid - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
Hey Rain Cloud!I enjoyed it, as did many others here - try reading the friendly discussion!
tipoo - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
I like articles like these. Sometimes certain processors stick around as the baseline in my brain even after a decade (holy hell!). Core 2 Duo is always a reference point for me, so is a 3GHz P4.rocky12345 - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
Yea I still have a Q6600 Core2Quad running strong in the front rooom OC to 3700Mhz been running like that since day 1.wumpus - Thursday, August 4, 2016 - link
Wow. I've assumed that they would at least burn out so that they would need replacement (like my old super celeries). I'm sure you can measure a speed increase between a modern i5 and yours, but it would be hard to notice it.chekk - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
Nice, thanks Ian. Interesting to look back and then ahead.I still use my E6400 in a media playback machine using the first "good" integrated graphics, the NVidia 9300. Since it runs at stock frequency @ 1V (VID spec is 1.325), it's pretty efficient too.