The high cost of NAND flash memory is not going to deter its increase in densities, which will grow more than 40% in home consoles and handheld devices in 2011, according to a new IHS iSuppli report.
For home video game consoles, the average NAND density is projected to reach 923 megabytes (MB) in 2011, up 42.2% from 649MB prior year, the IHS iSuppli NAND Dynamics Market Brief said.
For handheld game devices, the average NAND density is likely to reach 123MB in 2011, up 41.4% from 87MB last year.
Average NAND densities in both platforms will continue to grow to 3.5GB and 428MB in home consoles and handhelds, respectively, in 2015, with a 40% five-year compound annual growth rate, beginning from 2010.
The Wii from Nintendo includes 512MB of embedded NAND memory, while the Sony’s current PlayStation 3 does not use NAND and employs a hard disk drive as storage.
The entry-level Xbox 360 from Microsoft also started out with just 256MB when introduced in late 2008, before expanding to 512MB and its current 4GB level.
One other avenue for increasing NAND density in home consoles is to enhance removable storage, for example by allowing game installs to be saved on a high-performance flash drive.
