"Strong Fist and Rectify" Bitcoin Mining! SSD "flash crash", TSMC's 5nm cut orders for 20,000 pieces!

Recently, many virtual currency "mining" projects have been required to be shut down, and the solid-state drive SSD market has been implicated.

On May 21st, Liu He presided over the 51st meeting of the State Council’s Financial Stability and Development Committee and clearly proposed to "combine Bitcoin mining and trading." Later, local governments responded, including Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Qinghai, Yunnan, and Sichuan. And other major mining provinces and regions.

Among them, the Sichuan Provincial Development and Reform Commission and the Sichuan Provincial Energy Bureau showed in the notification document that the State Grid Sichuan Electric Power Company has reported 26 suspected "mining" projects, and it is expected to complete the screening and shut down before June 20. Due to abundant water resources, Sichuan was once the province with the most concentrated virtual currency "mining" in China and even the world.

Consumption of large amounts of electricity is one of the main reasons why the country requires the shutdown of "mining". Bitcoin and other virtual currencies are composed of computer-generated complex codes, which need to be obtained through computer operations according to algorithms. The mining machines used for mining are very powerful. It needs to consume a lot of electricity. According to reports, a "mine" with a scale of 10,000 mining machines can consume 45 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a month.

In fact, the world is suppressing the “mining” of virtual currencies such as Bitcoin. For example, Iran, which previously announced a four-month mining ban, because the huge power consumption has had a great impact on local production and life. The reason is that it consumes too much electricity. Research by the Alternative Finance Research Center of the University of Cambridge shows that as of May 10, 2021, the annual electricity consumption of global Bitcoin mining is about 149.37 TWh, which exceeds the consumption of Malaysia, Ukraine, and Sweden. Power.

The suppression of Bitcoin and other virtual currency mining and trading has also had a great impact on the electronics industry chain. Last week, the world’s largest cryptocurrency mining machine manufacturer Bitmain suspended the global spot sale of Ant mining machines. According to media reports, Bitmain will also reduce TSMC’s production volume. In the fourth quarter, 5nm cut orders for about 20,000 pieces, which is expected to bring a $300 million decline in revenue to TSMC, accounting for 0.5% of the company’s annual revenue.

A large number of low-priced SSDs are seen in the second-hand market, and manufacturers sell at low prices.

Recently, there was news that a large number of high-capacity and low-priced SSDs appeared in a second-hand market. At the same time, manufacturers and distributors were selling SSD products that they had stocked at low prices. Some of the previous popular models have seen substantial price cuts. For example, the Western Digital SN550 hard drive 1TB version is only 599 yuan. , Was smashed in May, the 1TB version once rose to 1,299 yuan, and the usual price is also 700 yuan.

The recent sharp drop in SSD prices is related to the collapse of the Chia coin price. Bitcoin, Ether, and other mining mainly rely on processor computing power, while Chia is different. The output mainly depends on the hard disk computing power. The larger the remaining capacity, the read and write The faster the speed, the higher the production capacity. Before the Chia coin was very hot, the price once rose to 1,600 US dollars in May and recently fell to about 250 US dollars. Today's price is about 280 US dollars.

Mining requires a large amount of SSD capacity and requires a large amount of data read and write on the hard disk, which greatly consumes the life of the SSD. It is reported that a 1T nvme solid-state hard disk works in the mine for a month, and the amount of data that needs to be stored reaches 100TB. It's about 100,000GB. However, because many solid-state hard drives used for mining can basically read and write up to 500TB, even if 400TB has been read and written, the remaining 100TB is enough for ordinary users, so there are many large-capacity sold at low prices in the second-hand market. SSD.

In the past, due to the hot Chia coin market, many manufacturers and channel merchants hoarded many solid-state hard disk products, but now as the market fades, these merchants have to sell at low prices. According to industry sources, during the 618 periods, many manufacturers carried out price reductions and sales promotions. Products, according to flash memory market data, last week channel SSD prices were lowered across the board, 120GB SATA SSD quotation was lowered from 16.2 US dollars to 15.6 US dollars, a decrease of 3.7%; 240GB SATA SSD quotations were lowered from 25.8 US dollars to 25 US dollars, a decrease of 3.1%; 480GB SATA SSD The quotation was lowered from 46 US dollars to 45.2 US dollars, a decrease of 1.7%.

More noteworthy, in recent years, the global chip production capacity has been insufficient, and the prices of main control chips and NAND Flash particles upstream of SSDs have also risen sharply. That is to say, the products stocked by the above-mentioned manufacturers are actually bought at higher prices than usual. Nowadays, although the sales promotion method is used to obtain good sales data, the actual profit level is not good, and even a loss.

Solid-state drive technology is gradually optimized and there are many players

SSD (Solid State Drive) is a hard drive made of an array of solid electronic memory chips. Its structure mainly includes the main control chip, flash memory, external cache particles, PCB boards, etc. The main control chip is similar to the CPU responsible for internal operations, and the flash memory NAND Flash is mainly Used to store content.

The first solid-state hard drive product appeared 30 years ago, and it has been continuously optimized and improved. The product has improved in performance and size. At present, manufacturers are constantly developing and upgrading new technologies. At present, solid-state hard drives support two hard drive standard protocols: AHCI and NVMe, the transmission protocol is divided into SATA bus and PCIe channel. The interfaces mainly include SATA, M.2, PCI-E, and U.2, among which SATA and M.2 interfaces are more common.

The SATA interface usually refers to a 2.5-inch solid-state hard drive, which only uses the AHCI protocol, and the SATA interface uses the SATA bus. M.2 interface is divided into NVMe protocol and AHCI protocol solid-state drives, M.2 interface can go M.2 (SATA bus) and M.2 (PCIe channel), M.2 (SATA bus) uses AHCI protocol, M. 2 (PCIe channel) uses NVMe protocol.

The maximum theoretical speed of the NVMe protocol is 32Gbps, the maximum transmission speed of the mainstream SATA3.0 bus is 6Gbps, and the actual speed is about 560MB/s. The read speed of the M.2 solid-state drive using the NVMe protocol can reach about 3.5GB/s. It is 6 times that of traditional SATA solid-state drives.

SSD manufacturers mainly have their own original NAND Flash manufacturers and module manufacturers that use other manufacturers' NAND Flash. The original manufacturers mainly include Samsung, Kioxia, Western Digital, Micron, SK Hynix, Intel, etc. The market share is about 35%. , SSD module manufacturers mainly include Kingston, ADATA, Tigo, Taipower, MaxSun, Lenovo, Lexar, colorful, Galaxy, Transcend, etc. The market share of shipments is about 65%.

summary

In fact, the above-mentioned chia coin’s impact on the demand and price of solid-state drives is only a short-term phenomenon. From a long-term perspective, the market prospects of solid-state drives are considerable. The market research organization IDC predicts that global SSD sales and shipments will be synchronized in the next four years The shipment volume is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.8%, and the compound annual growth rate of sales revenue is 9.2%. It is estimated that by 2025, the market revenue of SSD is expected to reach 51.5 billion U.S. dollars.

The main reason is that in addition to the surge in PC market demand, the focus also comes from companies’ investment in cloud computing and traditional IT equipment. The growth momentum of SSDs in the past few years is also obvious. In the first half of 2020, the server market will bring growth to SSDs. The increase in shipments in the global PC market also drives the growth of SSD sales. In the future, data centers and PCs will continue to be the main growth areas for SSDs. After all, the popularity of the chia coin is only a temporary trend for the market demand and price rise and fall of SSD.