The other day, at the seventh China Electronic Information Expo (CITE2019) in Shenzhen, the first solid-state drive SSD P8260 assembled exclusively from Chinese components was demonstrated at the booth of Tsinghua Unigroup. This is a server class SSD in which the controller, DRAM buffer and 3D NAND array are designed and manufactured in China. Well, China has taken the next step and expects to follow this path to complete independence from the memory of foreign production.
Anyone who follows the news about the development and production of 3D NAND memory in China knows that Yangtze River Storage Technology (YMTC), a joint venture with Tsinghua, is engaged in the release of flash memory chips. The P8260 uses the first YMTC products in the form of 32-layer 3D NAND chips with a capacity of 64 Gb. Toward the end of the year, the manufacturer will begin producing 128-Gbps 64-layer 3D NAND chips, which will allow YMTC to get on a commercial footing - while production is at a loss.
The DRAM for the SSD buffer is manufactured by Tsinghua's subsidiary Guoxin Micro. The buffer size is not reported. The controller was developed by Chinese company Beijing Ziguang Storage Technology, which is also affiliated with Tsinghua Unigroup.
The P8260 controller and drive support the NVMe 1.2.1 protocol and PCI Express 3.0 x4 interface. Support for 16 memory channels is announced, which promises high bandwidth, but the exact performance data of the P8260 is also not reported. To work with the DRAM buffer, the processor has a dual-channel memory controller with a 40-bit bus and ECC support. The P8260 SSD is available in two versions: 1TB and 2TB in PCIe card and U.2 drive form factors.
In addition to the P8260 drives, the manufacturer also showed consumer SSDs of the P100 and S100 families. However, the company purchases 3D NAND memory for these models from partners. One such partner, for example, is Intel.
Source: 3dnews.ru