Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch

Samsung reshuffles semiconductor execs after poor performance in memory and NAND competitiveness

• Samsung has revamped its leadership team to strengthen its memory and foundry chip divisions as it strives to compete with rivals SK hynix and TSMC in the rapidly growing AI market.

• The firm is rumored to suffer from low foundry yields, failing to land strategically important orders from large clients. It has smaller market share of HBM3E memory than SK hynix, and is behind both Micron and SK hynix in terms of validation by Nvidia.

Kioxia adopted for NEDO project to innovate memory under post-5G system infrastructure project

• AI is estimated to generate an unprecedented volume of data in the post-5G information and communication era, next-gen. memories facilitate rapid data transfer with high-performance processors while increasing capacity and reducing power consumption.

• Collaborating with Japan’s national research and development agency-NEDO, Kioxia will focus on the R&D of Compute Express Link (CXL) interface standard to pursue lower power consumption and higher bit density than DRAM, and faster read speed than flash memory.

WDC released SSDs for creators and gamers

• New products include 2-4TB ($280/$430) SanDisk Extreme PRO with USB4 performance portable SSD, 8TB ($800) SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD, 1-2TB ($60/$160) WD_BLACK SN7100 NVMe M.2 SSD, and 2TB ($200) WD_BLACK C50 Expansion Card for Xbox.

SK hynix leads market with HBM3e 16hi products

• This new product features a 48GB capacity per cube and is aimed at applications that include CSPs’ custom ASICs and general-purpose GPUs.The 16hi HBM3e is expected to push memory capacity limits ahead of the HBM4 generation’s launch, with sampling scheduled for 2025 1H.

Micron sampling 6550 ION PCIe Gen5 up to 61TB data center SSD in E3.S form factor

• As the industry’s 1st E3.S and PCIe Gen5 60TB SSD,the 6550 ION excels in high-capacity NVMe workloads such as networked AI data lakes, ingest, data preparation and checkpointng, file and object storage, public cloud storage, analytic databases, and content delivery. It has just entered customer sample stage.

SUPPLY TREND

2024-2025 Worldwide SSD Shipment

WW SSD demand is expected to reach a peak at the end of 2024, and 2025 shipment is expected to grow gradually by quarter

2024-2025 Worldwide DRAM Output

DRAM production for all applications started resuming in 2024/B, and 2025 general output status is likely to stay above 2024’s quarterly level.

2024-2025 NAND Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio

Flash Sufficiency: maintained at low level since 2024/B

Price Trend: NAND flash price is likely to drop during 4Q24-1Q25, yet some chip makers plan to do a new round of production cuts to reduce the extent price drops

2024-2025 DDR4 Price Trend & Sufficiency Ratio

DRAM Sufficiency: maintained at extreme low level throughout 2024 but is likely to have more production in 2025 1H to fulfill HBM demands
Price Trend: 8Gb contract price had a strong rebound at Q1/E’24, price level is similar since then. In 2025, DRAM price might drop a bit but remain relatively high from the lowest spot price level

SUPPLY SIGNAL

	Type	Supply	Price
DRAM Module	DDR3	●	▂
	DDR4	●	▂
	DDR5	●	▂
Flash Storage	SLC	●	▂
	MLC	●	▂
	3D TLC (BiCS3) *Limited Supply. We encourage you to migrate to BiCS5	●	▂
	3D TLC (BiCS4) * Tight supply. We encourage you to migrate to BICS5.	●	▂
	3D TLC (BiCS5)	●	▼