New 3D NAND flash will triple capacity of SSDs, Intel and Micron say
Gordon Mah Ung / PC World :
Context & Ripple Effects
In March 2015 Intel and Micron announced a way out of a squeeze: planar NAND was running out of room to shrink, so their then-unbroken manufacturing partnership would stack cells vertically instead, tripling what fits in an SSD die. The claim landed in a crowded season for storage news — just months later Samsung countered with a 16TB 2.5-inch SSD, and that summer the same partners unveiled 3D XPoint, a non-transistor memory pitched as far faster than flash.
First-order effects
- SSD buyers get a threefold capacity ceiling at the same fab footprint, immediately pressuring Samsung and other flash makers whose drives compete on price per gigabyte.
- The joint Intel-Micron fabs gain a differentiation lever over rival NAND producers still scaling in two dimensions.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's 16TB SSD launch shows competitors answering density with density, turning capacity per package into the headline metric of the flash market.
- Higher layers per stack compound over generations — Micron's fifth-generation 176-layer NAND five years later traces directly back to the vertical-stacking bet made here.
Third-order effects
- Once stacking replaces lithographic shrink as the scaling engine, the economics of NAND shift toward capital-intensive layer counts, and the Intel-Micron partnership itself dissolves after the third generation — joint R&D ends where product competition begins.
- Density gains ultimately feed the data-center appetite visible today in Micron's PCIe 6.0 SSDs aimed at AI deployments, making storage capacity a component of compute buildouts rather than a PC accessory market.
The trend: NAND moved from horizontal shrink to vertical stacking, with cross-company development partnerships giving way to head-to-head layer-count competition as each generation matured.