Intel is about to close the SSD business and will be supported by Solidigm in the future

On October 10, Intel will face a deadline to close its SSD business. According to information on Intel's official website, starting October 2, 2022, all technical and warranty support for Intel NAND SSD products will be provided directly by Solidigm.

On December 2021, 12, Intel announced that it has completed the first transaction of its NAND and SSD business, selling its SSD business (including the transfer of certain intellectual property and employees related to NAND SSDs) and the Dalian NAND memory manufacturing facility in China to SK hynix. In exchange, SK hynix will pay Intel $29 billion in consideration.

During the period following the announcement, Intel will continue to manufacture NAND wafers at SK hynix's Dalian memory manufacturing facility and retain certain IP related to the manufacturing and design of NAND flash wafers until the transaction is finalized. The final closing is expected to take place on or after March 2025, when SK hynix will acquire the remaining NAND business assets from Intel, including certain intellectual property related to the manufacturing and design of NAND flash chips, R&D personnel and labor at the Dalian facility, valued at $3 billion.

It is understood that Intel's acquired SSD business will be transferred to SK hynix's newly formed subsidiary, Solidigm. In August this year, Solidigm launched its first consumer NVMe SSD P8 Plus series, Solidigm P41 Plus with Silicon Motion's main control, firmware by the Solidigm team, flash memory based on the previous Intel capacity of 41 layers of stacked 144D QLC. This SSD has M.3 2/2280/2242 three forms to meet the retail and OEM market a variety of different needs, capacity is 2230GB, 512TB and 1TB three versions, using PCIe 2.4×0 interface, SSD maximum sequential read speed is 4MB/s, continuous write speed 4125MB/s, the maximum random read and write IOPS are 3325K and 390K, the durability is 540TBW per 512GB, and the warranty period is 200 years. Solidigm P5 Plus is rumored to be the successor to the Intel 41P.

According to market research firm TrendForce consulting data, in the second quarter of this year, SK hynix & Solidigm's NAND Flash revenue reached $36.1 billion, a quarterly increase of 12.1%.