SK hynix Acquires Intel’s NAND Flash Memory Business for $9 Billion

[Tsing]

Image: SK hynix



Well, that was fast. Right on the heels of this evening’s reports, SK hynix has announced that it is officially buying Intel’s NAND memory business for $9 billion.



That would include Intel’s NAND SSD business, as well as its NAND component and wafer business. SK hynix is also getting Intel’s Dalian NAND memory manufacturing facility in China.



As noted in our previous coverage, this deal does not involve Intel’s 3D Xpoint technology. The company will continue to produce SSD products leveraging its NAND alternative under the Optane name.



Original Press Release



SK hynix and Intel today announced that they have signed an agreement on Oct. 20, KST, under which SK hynix would acquire Intel’s NAND memory and storage business for US $9...

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[Grimlakin]

well there you have it. Intel pulling an IBM move. Interesting.

 

[Uvilla]

A little sad. Intel would be fine if they would have left the division move at their own pace. Do their own marketing.
I don't think they function like that, they spread their poor management all over.
Their products could have been dominant in retail no problems, the quality is there, has been there to do better.

 

[Zarathustra]

Interesting.

For the longest time I've said that the two SSD brands I trust are Samsung and Intel. Will have to see how SK Hynix manages this.

 

[Brian_B]

Interesting.

For the longest time I've said that the two SSD brands I trust are Samsung and Intel. Will have to see how SK Hynix manages this.

Has Intel really done anything major with SSDs in the near past? The last I can really think of them as a daily name in SSDs were the X25's, if you don't count Optane.

Really a shame about Optane, it had some promise, but kinda fizzled out. I think Intel bet a lot on that as well, and that may be what is driving this sale as much as anything.

 

[Uvilla]

Is optane part of this deal?
If it is, it gets dumber by the minute.

 

[Brian_B]

Is optane part of this deal?
If it is, it gets dumber by the minute.

It is not.

 

[Stoly]

It is not.

optane is pretty much dead anyway

 

[Uvilla]

optane is pretty much dead anyway

No, I think its a big deal in servers.
For desktop, I think it will be in time, if production is ever enough to spill over and drop in price.
Edit: pfft, seems I remembered Intels rosy view of optane, and nothing else. Reading other articles, things don't look that great.

 

[Brian_B]

No, I think its a big deal in servers.
For desktop, I think it will be in time, if production is ever enough to spill over and drop in price.
Edit: pfft, seems I remembered Intels rosy view of optane, and nothing else. Reading other articles, things don't look that great.

Yeah. It had a ton of promise. In reality it hasn't really done much - too slow to outright replace DRAM, and traditional SSDs are already so fast as to not be a bottleneck so being faster than an SSD doesn't really buy you anything outside of some very niche applications. The only play it ever really made was to act as HDD cache, but SSDs can already do that just as well, so....

It might have had a place in mobile, if they could have got the price/power down, as having combined RAM/storage in a single hardware device would be a big deal, but Intel doesn't ever seem to be able to imagine anything correctly for mobile applications.

 

[Stoly]

No, I think its a big deal in servers.
For desktop, I think it will be in time, if production is ever enough to spill over and drop in price.
Edit: pfft, seems I remembered Intels rosy view of optane, and nothing else. Reading other articles, things don't look that great.

Well, I haven't heard any optane news in years (no news is bad news), so I don't know how has it developed. I think it still tops at 120gb on the m2 form factor.

IOPS/latency wise, some high end pci-e 3.0 ssds already meet or exceed performance and it will only get worse with pci-e 4.0 ssds.