SSD costs anticipated to spike as Intel, AMD ship new server processors

By | August 13, 2021

Costs of enterprise-grade solid-state drives are more likely to bounce within the coming months, maybe by as a lot as 15% over present SSD costs, says TrendForce, a Taiwanese market analysis agency that focuses on the reminiscence market.

In a uncommon and little doubt unintentional transfer, Intel and AMD are on a path to start delivery new processors at roughly the identical time: Intel with its Ice Lake era of Xeon processors and AMD with its Milan processors. You may count on HP Enterprise, Dell Applied sciences, Lenovo, Tremendous Micro, and each different OEM to unleash a raft of servers on the similar quarter as they often do.

 

 

This can drive development in server shipments but additionally drive up the share of high-density merchandise in North American hyperscalers’ enterprise SSD purchases, in accordance with TrendForce. The identical is anticipated in China, the place home hyperscalers Alibaba and ByteDance are anticipated to extend purchases as effectively.

World SSD manufacturing capability will bear a 7% quarter-to-quarter enhance, but when the expected burst in demand occurs, it gained’t be sufficient to maintain up with demand. TrendForce is predicting a 15% bounce in enterprise SSD costs from the second quarter to the third quarter of this yr.

TrendForce predicts demand for servers will decelerate in This fall, together with demand for enterprise SSD, and the elevated pricing will regulate again. But when historical past is any information, server ramps are usually unfold out over a number of quarters. I am skeptical that if Intel and AMD each ship new chips in Q3, the gross sales bubble will burst by This fall.

Searching into 2022, TrendForce notes Intel and AMD will kick off new processors with help for PCI Specific Gen5 and the CXL (Laptop Specific Hyperlink) interface. These are high-speed interconnects that imply a lot quicker information motion, and today, with large information units, shifting information is the bottleneck, not the processing half.

TrendForce says that NAND Flash suppliers have been fast-tracking their manufacturing of PCIe Gen5 SSDs in response to the upcoming mass manufacturing of the brand new processors, so these SSDs are more likely to see market launch between 2Q22 and 3Q22.