| | | Then there is the "new" Sandisk--
Sandisk Soars While Western Digital Stutters Post Spinoff
Mar. 19, 2025 7:53 AM ET
seekingalpha.com
brief excerpt:
Wall Street is either neutral or bullish on SNDK, with Raymond James initiating coverage at Market Perform; Equal Weight at Wells Fargo and Barclays and Overweight at Mizuho and Cantor. However, the most bullish analyst so far has been Morgan Stanley’s Joseph Moore who initiated coverage of SanDisk stock with an ‘Overweight’ rating and a $84 price target, good for 50% upside potential. According to Moore, Sandisk had a 14% share of the global NAND market in 2024; however, its JV with Kloxia gives it a 30% slice of the NAND market. Moore says the NAND cycle has recovered from the 2024 lows, but expects the market to be tough in the first half of 2025, “Despite uncertainty, this is one of the best risk/rewards in our coverage,” he wrote.
However, what really caught my attention is Sandisk’s new high bandwidth flash (HBF) patent, which Moore says could have wide computing applications. HBF is a NAND equivalent of high-bandwidth DRAM ( HBM). In the investor day presentation, Sandisk revealed that it’s developing bandwidth-optimised NAND with its HBF concept, which could provide equivalent HBM bandwidth with 8 to 16 times HBM capacity at the same cost. In effect, whole or part NAND layers can replace stacked HBM DRAM layers, connecting to a host GPU/CPU/TPU via a logic die and an interposer. For instance, a 8-high stack could have 6 x 512 GB NAND dies and 2 HBM with total capacity of 3.12 PB of total capacity, much bigger compared with 8Hi HBM chip with 192 GB of total capacity. An all-HBF 8Hi stack would provide 4 PB of capacity. Sandisk says HBF is not drop-in compatible with HBM, but shares the same electrical interface “with minor protocol changes.”
 Sandisk HBF Technology (Sandisk Investor Presentation)
Initially, Sandisk’s engineering team thought the HBF package would require a mixture of NAND and DRAM, with the DRAM used for caching critical data. However, this turned out not to be the case thanks to multi-head latent attention developed by DeepSeek AI researchers, “As a matter of fact, they are reporting that they’re able to reduce KV caches by 93 percent. So any innovation like that actually now would enable us to pack four terabytes of memory on a single GPU,” Sandisk’s SVP of Technology and Strategy Alper Ilkbahar said at the presentation.
Sandisk foresees 3 HBF generations, with gen 2 having 1.5x the capacity of gen 1 and 1.45x the read bandwidth, while gen 3 will provide 2x of gen 1 in both categories. The company says energy efficiency would also improve with subsequent generations. Sandisk is pushing for an open HBF standard ecosystem, and is currently setting up a technical advisory board “of industry luminaries and partners.” If the HBF concept gains traction, with the likes of Samsung, SK hynix and Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) adopting it, it could evolve into a near-storage-class memory concept.
more at the link
Sounds interesting but I can't claim to be able to actually assess it. I'd be interesting to hear others' opinions. |
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