Biwin Demos Acer Predator GM7 SSD With Banned Chinese Fab’s Flash, Planned for US Market
Despite an array of PCIe 5.0 SSDs on display, Acer licensee Biwin Technology had one of the most interesting drives at CES 2023. Acer Predator GM7 SSD with YMTC flash. YMTC is a China-based NAND flash chip maker that has caught up with the US and China. trade war. This flash maker is now on the US Entity List. This means that all imports and exports to the company must be reviewed and approved by the U.S. Department of Commerce. However, Biwin wants to bring this new SSD of his to the US market. Of course, as limits allow.
YMTC may seem like a little-known company, but its innovative flash architecture has led Apple to certify the use of flash in its devices and to help recruit staff. It has attracted some of the biggest names in the industry, includingGiven the new restrictions, Apple will Those plans were reportedly frozenbut Biwin is still moving forward with Acer-branded SSDs.
The flash at the center of the controversy is YMTC’s 128-layer Xtacking 3.0. This flash has a unique architecture built by stacking two different wafers, using the older process node technology for the logic on the bottom layer and the newer and higher technology on the top for the memory array that actually stores the data. Use the Density process node. This design offers all sorts of performance and cost advantages. All of which makes it a promising technology that poses a serious threat to established flash makers like Micron, Toshiba and Samsung. Of course, it is reasonable to think that new sanctions will blunt the threat.
Biwin takes this wafer of flash and packages it in the US to create the flash package shown in the drive above. The flash runs at 2,400 MT/s and the maximum power consumption for a single-sided M.2-2280 drive is 5.67W.
The drive features the Maxiotek MAP1602 DRAM-less SSD controller, also designed in China. This controller uses Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology and connects to the NVMe 1.4 protocol over a PCIe 4.0 x4 interface.
The 2 TB Acer Predator GM7 is officially rated with up to 7,200 / 6,300 MB sequential read/write throughput and 1 million random read/write IOPS. The company hasn’t shared a durability rating yet, but the drive comes with his five-year warranty. Drive capacities are 512 GB ($50), 1 TB ($90), and 2 TB ($160).
Biwin demonstrated a 1 TB drive in their suite at CES. Here we can see the SSD peaking at sequential read/write throughput of 5,671 / 4,960 MB/s. This drive also delivers 688,350 / 795,513 random read/write IOPS in these tests. Of course, these tests probably used new drives, so we’ll have to wait for the review to see how performance changes.
Pending regulatory approval, Biwin still hopes to bring these drives to the U.S. market, but there is no firm timeline for when they will become available. But we plan to make the drive available.