Toshiba today announced a new type of 3D NAND memory that should decrease latency significantly. The new NAND variant is called XL-Flash and will initially be used for SLC NAND. Later it should also become available in an MLC NAND variant.
(XL-Flash sheet — credits: AnandTech)
The Japanese electronics company made its announcement during Flash Memory Summit, currently held in Santa Clara, California. With XL-Flash the company hopes to reduce the read latency to 1/10th of TLC memory which should increase performance of random reads, especially at low queue depths. Toshiba appears to try with XL-Flash NAND to compete with non-volatile memory such as Intel and Micron's 3D Xpoint. Samsung tries the same with its Z-NAND technology.
XL-Flash is based on Toshiba's 96-layer BiCS4 3D NAND but it uses shorter bit and word lines to build a die with more planes than currently common on NAND devices.
It's unknown when the first products with XL-Flash will become available, nor did Toshiba provide any details on the costs of the new NAND variant.
