Micron Innovations Blog » performance

AS Benchmarks for RealSSD C300

Justin Sykes — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:28:51 +0000

We received a couple requests to show the AS benchmark results for the new drive. So we asked Todd to provide a couple screen shots of the results–and here they are.

Of course, our immediate goal is to get these in the hands of independent reviewers. You should see third-party tests coming out in the next month or so as we ramp to production and get drives sent out. Stay tuned–we’ll call out results both here and through our @RealSSD Twitter feed.

AS SSD Benchmark: 3G Empty

AS SSD Benchmark: 6G Empty

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You asked for it: RealSSD C300 random IOPs

Justin Sykes — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:40:57 +0000

A lot of people are excited about the C300 demos we posted last week, and a number of you asked to see the random read/write IOPs numbers for the new drives. So I’ve asked one of our Apps guys, Todd, to shoot a video of the C300 running through the Iometer test. These are 4K transfers on 100% random read/write tests with a queue depth of 32.

We’re using the same Intel Core2Duo system, equipped with our 256GB RealSSD C300 drive and a 6 Gb/s SATA host bus adapter. We also test it at SATA 3 Gb/s to show how it will perform in those systems. I think you’re going to like the results.

RealSSD C300 goes head-to-head with a hard drive in everyday tasks By now you've seen the benchmarks, but to show you...
Benchmarking the World’s Fastest Client SSD To prove it, we ran a few standard benchmarking tools...
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RealSSD C300 goes head-to-head with a hard drive in everyday tasks

Justin Sykes — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:46:24 +0000

By now you’ve seen our SSD vs SSD benchmarks, but to show you how that speed translates to the real world, we pitted our 256GB C300 SSD against a standard issue 7200rpm HDD in identical systems. We then tackled a handful of everyday tasks—boot up, file copy, and opening large files in Adobe® Photoshop®.

System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
OS: Windows® 7 Pro 64-b

Benchmarking the World’s Fastest Client SSD To prove it, we ran a few standard benchmarking tools...
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Benchmarking the World’s Fastest Client SSD

Justin Sykes — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:32:09 +0000

Our new RealSSD C300 outperforms every client SSD currently available on the market. To prove it, we ran a few standard benchmarking tools (PCMark Vantage’s disk suite and the classic disk benchmark ATTO) on identical systems. The only difference: a 256GB Micron RealSSD C300 in one system and the leading competitor’s 160GB SSD in the other.

System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
Drive Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (via Marvel HBA)

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Advanced MCPs for the Changing Mobile Market

Chris Smith — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:23:23 +0000

An interview with Eric Spanneut, director of mobile memory marketing.

Chris Smith: Eric, thanks for talking with me today. I’ve noticed that Micron has been focusing more and more energy on the mobile market. Today, the company introduced a new line of MCPs; could you tell me a bit about these products?

Eric Spanneut: We are announcing the adoption of our latest process technologies—both NAND and DRAM—to our line of high-end MCPs. It means that we have leveraged our 34nm single-level cell (SLC) technology on the NAND side, as well as our 50nm technology on the low-power DRAM side.

Chris: Is this the first 50nm designed into your MCP products?

Eric: This is our first monolithic 2Gb LPDRAM, which is being adopted by our MCP product line.

Chris: What range of the mobile market will these MCPs serve?

Eric: These products will serve the high-end feature phone market, and the smart phone market that uses open operating system like Windows Mobile, Android, or Symbian, as well as the nascent mobile internet device (MID) market.

Chris: I notice that this MCP uses LPDDR, but I know you manufacture LPDDR2; when will you transition this MCP to LPDDR2?

Eric: We see growing interest in LPDDR2, but first adoption by handset vendors won’t happen until second half of 2010. We expect LPDDR to be the front-runner in terms of volume for the next three to four years. That said, when the transition does begin, handset vendors will recognize significant advantages with LPDDR2, including reduced pin count, higher frequency and a better power budget.

Chris: So, if LPDDR2 has these benefits, why isn’t it being widely adopted at this time?

Eric: The mobile value chain is a very complex one with a complex ecosystem. It always takes a long time for a new technology to be massively adopted.

Chris: Back to today’s announcement; I imagine these die are much smaller than the packages that they go into. What are the benefits of using the latest process technology for these die inside the MCPs?

Eric: There are several benefits. The first one is that it allows us to be more competitive in the market place. The second benefit is that we are able to intercept smaller form factors by shrinking the dies. For example, we know that our 2Gb LPDDR can accommodate some small form factor designs that our competition’s LPDDR cannot accommodate. Finally, we want to minimize the number of dies we have in the package. It is better to have a 2Gb monolithic die in a package rather than two 1Gb monolithic die—not only because of cost, but also because of power and system optimization.

Chris: Will you provide different MCP densities?

Eric: Yes. We will start with 4Gb NAND and 2Gb LPDDR, and we’ll introduce higher densities-–up to 8Gb NAND and 8Gb LPDDR – as we see the handset market trend toward greater capacity requirements.

Chris: Do you have to increase package size by going to those higher densities?
Eric: The package size doesn’t change, just the package thickness as you stack more die.

Chris: Tell us about some of the trends you’re seeing in the mobile memory market and what’s driving these trends?

Eric: We see a polarization of the market place with a stronger high-end market and devices like smart phones booming. We also see more and more low-end phones being produced as well as a booming data card market which consumes lots of SLC NAND and low density low-power DRAM.

On the LPDDR side, the high-end market requires higher densities, higher performance and higher frequencies. Micron was actually the first to support 200 megahertz on LPDDR—it’s an important benchmark because certain chipsets require these higher frequencies to operate. We’re also seeing some initial interest in LPDDR2, even though LPDDR will be the volume leader for several years.

On the NAND side, we see an increasing shift from NOR to NAND. There are a few reasons for this. Largely, the growing requirement for higher densities and multimedia technologies is driving this. Past a certain density, NAND presents a much better cost structure for these requirements. Chipset support is also shifting toward NAND–-the ecosystem is now set up to support the massive adoption of NAND.

There is also increased momentum for high-density embedded MMC (managed NAND) deployment. In the past, handset manufacturers preferred external mass storage to keep their BOM cost low and their architecture flexible. But now, handset vendors see embedded mass storage as a way to differentiate themselves in the high-end part of the market. Density really is a differentiator in the market today.

Embedded MMC should also get further traction with the 4.4 standard which will provide important booting and security features.

Chris: what is the NAND & NOR market breakdown?

Eric: In 2008, NOR still represented a majority of the non-volatile memory shipments in the handset space, while we expect it to only account for about one quarter of these in the 2012 time-frame.

Chris: What is Micron doing to provide extra value to handset manufacturers?

Eric: We work a lot with the entire mobile value chain. We work quite closely with operating system and chipset vendors. We spend a lot of time qualifying our memories with those key players. We also spend a lot of time developing additional software services, which improves the performance and endurance of our products.

All of this shows how much we’re committed to the mobile space and we believe our broader memory portfolio strongly positions us in the marketplace. We’re growing fast in the mobile market, we have had some major successes this year, and this new generation of MCPs really shows how competitive we are.

Chris: Eric, thanks again for your time, we look forward to talking with you again about innovations in the mobile market.

Eric: My pleasure.

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Enterprise NAND—Some Industry Perspective

Kirstin Bordner — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 22:45:39 +0000

We’ve had tremendous feedback from customers, partners, media and analysts on our Enterprise NAND announcement. So I thought I’d include a couple of perspectives from the industry on the potential impact of Enterprise NAND:

• “a significant milestone for the industry, one that’s likely to increase confidence in the technology.”
—Bob Merritt, analyst
InternetNews.com

• “proves wrong all those people who think that high-endurance devices will never be supported by advancing lithographies.”
—Jim Handy, analyst
Enterprise Storage Forum

• “Micron made a major announcement this week touting a new memory structure that simultaneously drives up the density and write performance of current Flash memory.”
IT Business Edge

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Tripling NAND Performance in Mobile Systems

Wanmo — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:11:27 +0000

We’ve been getting great response from customers who’ve seen our NAND performance demonstration, so we wanted to share it with a wider audience.

The test pits our single- and dual-plane SLC devices and NANDCode™ FTL software against Samsung’s OneNAND™ running on Microsoft’s FTL. The test system is a TI OMAP™ 3430 development platform running Windows Mobile® 6.5 OS. We changed out the onboard NAND with a simple PISMO card swap and then ran a 10MB system performance test.

The results are impressive and undeniable. The key is our custom NANDCode FTL software, which enables advanced performance features like dual-plane programming.

Watch the video below to see why some of our competitors’ customers have been willing to open their design cycles to take advantage of the big NAND performance gains offered by Micron’s MCPs.

Visit our Web site to learn more about our NANDCode software and how you can use it to boost performance in your next mobile design.

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Driving the Next Generation of Server Performance with LRDIMMs

Michael — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:00:27 +0000

Today we announced the world’s first DDR3 LRDIMMs, built with our advanced 50nm, 2Gb DDR3 components. If you’re in the server industry, you know that load-reduced DIMMs are going to deliver some much-needed performance and bandwidth boosts for next-generation servers. Their much higher capacity and performance specs mean that early LRDIMM servers will have up to 57% better bandwidth and as much as three times the memory density—up to 144GB. And you can expect those specs to rise as mainstream DDR3 production moves from 2Gb components to 4Gb and beyond.

How do they do it? Basically, an eight-rank LRDIMM can reduce memory load to a single load per channel (traditional RDIMM loads correspond to the number of ranks; dual-rank=2 loads, quad-rank=4 loads). Lower loads means you can put more DIMMs on a channel (and/or run the modules faster, depending on the configuration), boosting performance and memory density. LRDIMMs are also capable of much higher densities than RDIMMs; we’re making 16GB LRDIMMs today and plan for higher densities in the future.

We’re currently sampling these to buffer suppliers (to make sure our LRDIMMs are as fast and reliable as possible) and a few select server OEMs. You can probably expect to see ultra-high density, high-performance LRDIMM servers hitting the market before mid-year 2010. Want to know more? Visit our LRDIMM home page for full specs.

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Micron’s New NAND: Great Space, Less Filling

Kevin Kilbuck — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:30:11 +0000

No doubt about it—our appetite for mobile digital downloads continues to thrive. We’re downloading video, music, games and photos at a record pace. In fact, Nielsen says that online music stores saw more than 1 billion downloads last year. I’m a contributor to these downloads too–as I sit here and write this post, I’m jamming out to my iPod listening to the ever-so inspiring Mick Jagger. But I digress.

The point is, we need the storage capacity in our mobile devices to hold the huge amounts of data we consume. So what’s Micron doing to feed that capacity appetite? Today we announced new 16Gb and 32Gb NAND products built using our ground-breaking 34nm NAND process technology. These new NAND chips not only make it possible to store more on your smartphones, cell phones and MP3 players but also enable bigger and better memory cards, like Lexar’s new 16GB microSDHC card. Built with our super tiny 16Gb die, Lexar’s 16GB microSDHC card, can store up to 48,000 2-megapixel JPEG photos, 4,000 songs, or 80 hours of standard-def video—allowing you to super size your portable device’s capacity and enjoy more of the stuff you love.

And for the photography buffs out there, Micron’s new 32Gb NAND chip has made it possible for Lexar to create a new 32GB Lexar Platinum II SDHC memory card. That’s enough capacity for 12 hours of HD video or over 20,000 5-megapixel images! And since we’ve added a high-speed NAND interface to all of our new high-capacity NAND products, these new cards are seriously fast; speed-rated at 60x. This gives our photo enthusiasts the ability to take full advantage of their camera’s burst-mode setting to capture many images in rapid fire succession.

So whether it’s photos, video, music, or games you’re after, Micron’s new NAND products give your portable devices the additional capacity they need to store all your favorites—so you can watch and rock out to more media than ever before, all from the palm of your hand.

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Power and Performance

Michael — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:00:59 +0000

DDR3 SODIMM: Small package, big low-power performance

If you design electronics, you’re used to thinking of power savings and performance as opposite poles—you’ve typically had to trade one to get the other. But it really is possible to deliver low power with high performance. In fact, we’ve found ways to continually reduce DRAM power needs while still hitting aggressive performance targets. It’s a strategy we’re calling “performance efficiency.” We see lots of opportunity for our DRAM to make a significant difference in a variety of applications—now and in the years ahead. We can save power and still deliver unprecedented levels of performance.

As a proof point, today Micron announced a new line of high-performance DDR3 SODIMMs that run at just 1.35V (standard DDR3 DIMMs run at 1.5V). That .15V difference may seem miniscule, but it amounts to a significant power savings—our estimates put it at about 20%. But the cool thing is that these SODIMMs aren’t any slower than their power-hungry siblings. They can hit 1333 MT/s in stride—plenty of throughput for the latest generation of high-performance laptops. Check them out: view DDR3 1.35V SODIMMs.

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