Hmm, ram chip wise, what are the current options anyway...
Samsung: Still sampling only 6 GB 64-bit up to 5500 MT/s? Are they just being lax in updating that page?
SK Hynix: In the mobile category, 1 and 1.5 GB 16-bit up to 6400 MT/s are in production. In the PC category, 1 GB 16-bit up to 6400 MT/s is in production. I take it that 'ball' is pin count, but I don't know what pin count implies about the intended device. I'm assuming that 2 GB 16-bit chips in the mobile category is in sampling (that 18's gotta be a typo, right?).
Micron: Hmm, all 32-bit chips are still sampling. For 64-bit, there are 6, 8, and 12 GB chips in production. 4 GB 64-bit is in sampling.
(aside: if we're going solely by what it's in production right now, then the only possible vendor for Steam Deck's 16 GB, 128-bit setup is Micron)
So do you think that with Switch Dane there may be an abandonment of eMMC and micro SD in favor of NVMe SSDs?
For a device that targets a power usage of single digit watts in handheld form, the natural/intended successor to eMMC and micro SD would be eUFS and UFS cards. They're designed to maintain the same low power usage as the older formats. eUFS as internal storage is something phones have moved on to, I believe. UFS cards on the other hand have yet to take off; I think that only Samsung makes and sells them right now? And only Samsung devices actually use them right now?
There is also SD Express, but as you've noticed, the availability's certainly a question mark right now. Also, the one review we've seen of an SD Express card revealed a disappointingly high power draw.
The thing about NVMe drives is that, comparatively speaking, they're not that power efficient actually. I think that on average (excluding outliers like the SK Hynix Gold P31), NVMe drives typically fall in the range of 500 to 700 MB/s per watt in sequential read in synthetic tests. 500-700 MB/s is faster than eMMC, sure. But when one sees 'NVMe', multi GB/s speeds are probably what comes to mind, and that takes multiple watts to do. In desktop space, several watts is a rounding error; nobody cares. In laptop space, it's a sort of a 'the cost is there, but it's worth it' thing (although, depending on which drive is used,
battery life can vary significantly). But for the Switch in handheld mode? There's not enough power to spare to allow NVMe to stretch its legs.
Both eMMC and eUFS power consumption is hard for me to find...
Samsung's page for
eMMC 5.1 claims a sequential read of up to 330 MB/s and power usage of 0.5 watts. So, 660 MB/s per watt, which is in the range of a decent NVMe drive.
Then looking at the data sheet for
ISSI's eMMC 5.0... sequential read of up to 272 MB/s. Power consumption of... I'm not sure if I'm doing this right, but it's either 1.8v * 186 mA=0.3348 watts or 3.3v * 47 mA = 0.1551 watts. Uhh... let's go with 0.3348 watts for this post. Then it normalizes out to 812 MB/s per watt.
I haven't even found any power usage numbers for eUFS. We know that it's faster than eMMC. Presumably the power draw remains in the same area, ergo it's assumed that the speed per watt is much better. We do know that in practice, smartphones moved to/are moving to eUFS instead of NVMe.