live from San Francisco it's the queue covering micron insight 2019 back to you by micron welcome back to micron insight 2019 in San Francisco you watching the cube the leader and live tech coverage we're wrapping up our day Dave Volante with David Floria we're Kia Jones is here she's the senior principal for 5g connectivity in the GPM group at Microsoft great to see you great to see you guys it's been a wonderful day yeah nice job up on stage today you know we're gonna talk a little bit about a 5g and get your perspectives on it but tell us more about your group and sort of what you focused yeah well you know I'm in Azure and azure is even though it's our cloud infrastructure there has to be a lot of backbone support so inside of networking we have all those components that would support the physical structure of cloud technology so we focus on virtualizing a lot of the different managed services that we have and we provide those to customers for scalability and sustainable models that allow them to pretty much transport data safely what's it like inside of Microsoft these days I mean what a transformation of the company I did a little segment on LinkedIn the other day a little video segment there's a lot of ways if you want to spend some money there's a lot of ways to spend money with Microsoft you know you got cloud you got an application management you got security you got all the abs I mean really is you're hitting on all cylinders it's what a dynamic what's it like inside of there these days you know I think I think the world now is very different I see Microsoft making a huge transformation over the last have only been there three years but what I can say to you is that I see that the opportunity is there for partnership now which is something that I don't think we focused on we did too well in the past with our new CEO Satya Nadella and Peggy Johnson who leads our business development I mean we are really taking the the game and just changing and and making making it more something that we can do with everyone instead of in silo and so the culture is definitely changing is their opportunity yeah but I think our company is dedicated and focused on you know creating more diverse technology that can meet two customer's needs all over the yeah I mean windows are still a huge part of Microsoft's business but it's not the future of Microsoft it's very very impressive to see that transformation all right what what should we know about 5g what's Microsoft's put point of view on 5g what's the opportunity for you well that's a great question a lot of people were like Microsoft and 5g how does that work well in the past I think with the telcos and all the communication service providers we've always been either their customer or they've been our customer the new world that we're going into now is how do we help the telcos now be better enablers so that we can accelerate business and so I took over this charter along with my boss Yusuf Khalidi and about a year ago and our vision for what we thought we could do came to really great reality when we understood the the ecosystem that already existed this this business of 5g is not as simple as it sounds so what we decided to do and we released a press release back in July was we're going pretty much all in in a sense with AT&T in helping them with their global strategy for really Wireless you know to help stabilize their wireless network and combine some software-defined principles and capabilities so what they're they're already planning for in the future so I think with that transformation honestly a lot of it is unknown but we're taking a day by day we're talking earlier about a lot of is unknown in terms of like what apps are going to emerge who's gonna pay for what but but there's a lot of hype around 5g certainly a lot of folks in the technology community you're excited about it yeah help us understand what's real and what's not what's hype and what sort of things that users can actually expect and then I want to know exact months and you know what I think if you can imagine it it's a possibility I think it all boils down to the type of partnerships I always say that it's the power of three in the sense in the past has always been the power of two where two companies come together we can make it work well now you need you need an extra component not only do you need a company like Microsoft but you need to tell Co but you're going to need a system integrator right and I'm not talking about the hardware side but more of the software application side I think if a lot of people talking about like these things we know that smart city we think that's a possibility real soon mmm I still think we got it way to go with a lot of the townships and the city infrastructures moving so slow with governmental policies changing I think that we can likely see improvement in connected vehicles connected you know Internet of Things in and if everything is coming we first must be able to connect the dots with those things first before we actually bring in a government entity I think they have a lot of questions that we're not yet ready to answer and so I think there's a lot of great need for POCs and that's what my team focuses on inside of Azure networking he's looking at what can be the next PLC where we can help truly define the next generation requirements you're kind of acting as the accelerant I like the power three analogy a bump set spike yeah right now fashion sports analogies in the cube and then you know you point about I think governments is right on I was saying the earlier to David that I participated in a mayor of Boston as this you know the Smart City future initiative and you're talking 2050 oh yeah you know that's their time horizon I'm trying to figure that that's right around the corner yeah I mean I can't believe we're about to be in the 2020 feels like I just graduated high school when you're looking at these opportunities there seems to be a big divergence of opinion in terms of networking between are you going to push the processing out to the edge and do as much of it possible there and only take the the subset of data from that processing or are you going to bring it in to some sort of center to do do the processing there yeah what are you what are you seeing in your five-year as the models of computer putting together compute storage and networking yeah for me I have a this is rukia's opinion but I think that in the future when we talk about compute we need to be able to chop it up and we need to sell it to individuals individuals could be enterprises or consumer in my world and the way I think about this I think that we have an enormous amount of opportunity to give customers freedom and flexibility if we're not able to give them freedom and flexibility I think that we really limit the possibilities of what truly podgy can bring and so in my world I believe that you should be able to prepay for your computing power I believe that you can literally distribute it among all your devices within your families like you know you have the family rate plans that the telcos are selling well think about this and that family rate plan now there's an additional component that you will sell which will be compute I may not want to go as fast as you like for gaming for instance absolutely right okay gaming for everyone and at the speed of what you need so atomic of components of compute that you can actually assign to individual users applications workloads yeah it's not - you told me tomorrow rookie what do you want to do that's not saying ok so what what are you doing here what's the connection between sort of Microsoft your role and you know this micron insight event micron is a a great partner with with Microsoft I think we do a lot of business as it relates to chips I specifically am here because Peggy Johnson supports the company and she's over our business development operations for the companies and she believes micron is on to something and so I'm proud to be here and getting to know more about the business visit micron and the partnerships that we can create in the future well we more partnerships obviously you need membrane storage to run all this totally do we can do it part of the build-out well Rukia thank you so much for for coming on the cube we'll give you the last word your takeaway is what should we be watching for from you and your group yeah I mean I think that as we go forth with our partnership with AT&T which happens to be one of the global carriers around the world we are planning for some amazing things and we will make announcements at our Microsoft ignite event in early November and so I hope that everyone will attend that event and perhaps support us by sharing the information and coming to talk to us about new partnerships with our clouds networking department great well we'll be there at ignite hope to have you back on that'll be great thank you and thank you everybody thank you David Fleur a great job with the crew which is a wrap from Pier 27 at Microsoft blending Microsoft mega you both say the same names right the insight conference micron inside 2019 check out Silicon angle comm check out the cube net for all the videos and we'll see you next time is Dave Volante for David floor thank you

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering micron insight 2019 brought to you by micron welcome back to San Francisco everybody we're here at Pier 27 the Sun is setting behind the the buildings in San Francisco you're watching the cube the leader in live tech cover jump date Volante with my co-host David Flair we've been here all day covering micron insight 2019 Tommy Vee is here is the senior vice president and general manager of the compute and networking business unit at micron Tama great to see you again great to see you so you got compute and networking two of the big three you're in your business unit there you go but we're gonna talk about 3d crosspoint today but so anyway you know absolutely we're kind of bringing you outside the swimlane or maybe not but tell us about your bu and what's the update yes we you know we sell primarily memory today DRAM although in the future we see 3d crosspoint it's a great opportunity into the the data center you know both traditional servers and the cloud players pcs graphics and networking yes so you get some hard news today why don't we dig into that a little bit we surely haven't covered much of it but okay yeah so I guess you know a couple couple things of interest probably most directly as we we announced our our first 3d crosspoint storage device it's a it's a it's the highest performance SSD in the world and offers compared to other 3d crosspoint based solutions on the market you know anywhere from three and a half to five times the performance on a range of both sequential and random reads and writes two and a half million I ops bandwidth readin right north of nine gigabytes a second and I'm super fast super fast fast and you know similar similar you know a very positive comparisons up against up against me and SSDs ok and so we're excited about that so where's the fit what are the use cases who you're targeting with sure yeah I mean I think you know that one way to think about it is that anytime you introduce a new layer into the memory and storage hierarchy you know historically it was SRAM caches and then it was SSDs going in between dear and rotating media now this is 3d crosspoint sitting in between DRAM and and NAND and and the reason it is a benefit in terms of another layer is it's you know higher density and and greater persistence than DRAM it's greater performance and and you know you can it can cycle greater endurance than the man and and when you do that you do nibble away at either side of that layer so in this case that nibbles away a little bit from DRAM and a little bit from NAND but it grows the overall pie and it's the only player in the industry that provides DRAM 3d crosspoint in and we think that's a great opportunity at some code to the economics cuz it's more expensive than and less expensive than the DRAM higher performance than the traditional flash short lower performance well under the performance of DRAM so yeah I mean so again I think you know the the the you know the benefits like I said is it's it offers greater density and it offers greater persistence than DRAM and so that's the advantage there and it offers much greater performance on things like bandwidth and I ops and much greater endurance than the NAND and certainly our preliminary results are in in applications like databases in certain AI and machine learning workloads and in workloads that that benefit from low latency I think financial service markets is one specific example you know we think there's a good value bro so so a Colombo question if I may yeah so si P would say no throw it throw everything in memory in Hana and of course sell the DRAM and say ok that's ok with us so you mentioned databases how should we think about this relative to in-memory databases sure I mean I think that if if you can afford it and of course it will be more expensive we would love to provide you know our highest density DRAM modules on on the highest end server platforms and you know put put you know you mentioned you know Hana database in the terabytes and terabytes of the RAM that would be great that is is not free if we refer you to do it right exactly and and so if you have the need for that performance that's will do but we we see there's a you know a an attractive range of workloads that cannot afford you know there's a costume that very high-end solution and so this affords something that that gives you know good benefits a database performance but at a slightly more I know you want to jump in go oh yeah sure I compare yourself with Intel which is obviously got the same raw technology they have gone for consumer type obtain [Music] SSDs but they put all their effort into combining it with a DVD or envied him and have combined that with the processor itself and made a combination which is very good for storage controllers yeah so the quest you can very well in in in the SSD much much much more than they have are you looking to go into that and the dim because he obviously you don't have the processes themselves to to to man yeah I mean you know to be clear the you know what we're offering today you know is a product that runs on standard and yeah and via me and while there may in the future be opportunities to further enhance performance with software optimization it runs you know out of the box absolutely without any software optimization and but I do think that you know there are opportunities both to use this technology in you know more of a storage type of configuration and and looking forward there are also opportunities to use it in a memory configuration you know what what what we're announcing today is our is our first storage and with regard to additional products you know stay tuned so if I think about the storage hierarchy you know the the classical pyramid and forget about let's let's focus on the persistent end of that spectrum yeah this is at the tip right is that how we should think about this or not necessarily I mean it is at the storage tip yes but I think we 10 to think a little bit more holistically that you know that that triangle extends from you know from DRAM traditionally to SSDs to rotating and we're now inserting a 3d crosspoint based layer in between and and so from that perspective it is it is the tip of the storage triangle right but it does sit below it does sit below DRAM so in the overall and the reason for my question was sort of a loaded question because if you eliminate the the DRAM piece now you've got that tip sewn and benefits from the volume of consumer thoughts on how you get volume with 3d crosspoint sure you know again I think there are you know at a at a lower performance point you know you can get higher density you know more cost effective storage solutions with that um and we certainly don't see you know NAND going away or we're quite bullish on that you're like man you know it's both a both a SATA and a nvme 96 layer TLC nan based products today so that's that continues to be a major area of investment but you know from a you know from a from a value and opportunity point of view we see a better opportunity you know applying this technology again into this layer in the you know in the in the server or datacenter hierarchy um you know as opposed to what one might be able to do in the consumer space and your OEM say bring it on right I mean they they want this we're talking about the server manufacturers data center yeah I mean I think we're in you know we're in we're in limited sampling with select customers so you know more to say about our go-to-market you know at a at a future date but certainly we we see that there is you know we're we're bullish about the opportunity the marketplace so just asking a question about volume making sure you if you look at the marketplace it's arm has been incredibly successful and it's driven a huge amount of memory and and Nan for yourself then that seems to be where the volume is growing much faster than most other platforms are you looking to use this technology 3d crosspoint as in in in that environment as even memory as in DRAM itself as memory itself at a much lower level I'm just thinking of ways that you could increase volume sure I mean so to be just just to be clear you're talking about what's driven overwhelmingly by by the cell phone market right obviously it's it's proliferating into IOT you know I guess again our our our view of the of the first and best opportunity is in the data center which is still today an x86 dominated world I would say you know in terms of opportunities like I said for you know memory based solutions in the data center um and for how we apply this in other areas you know stay tuned let's talk about this forward next acquisition so it's really interesting to see micron making moves in an AI why the acquisition tell us more about it sure yeah so it's a it's a it's a small small start-up you know handful of players although you know fairly experienced as as I believe sanjay mentioned they're on their their fifth generation of their architecture and so what we've acquired it's both it's both the hardware architecture that currently runs on FPGAs along with the supporting software that supports all the common frameworks the tensorflow is the the PI torches as well as the range of the network architectures you know that that are necessary to support again primarily on the inference side you know are we see the best opportunities in edge in fencing but in terms of what's behind the acquisition first of all there is there's an explosion of opportunity in machine learning we see that in particular on you know on edge inferencing and we feel that in order for us to continue to optimize and develop the best solutions both over all of a deep learning platform that includes memories but also just memories that are best optimized we need to understand you know when you noticed in the workloads we understand the best solutions and and and so that's why we made this acquisition we integrated it with our team that has for some time developed FPGA based adding cards and it's actually the basis of the technology for some of the dialog that used to offer example with OHSU when you talk about edge inferencing we're envisioning this sort of massively scalable distributed system that of course comprises edge you want to bring the compute to the data wherever the data lives obviously don't want to start moving data around now you're bringing a eye to that data which is the data data ai cloud all these superpowers coming together uh-huh so our premise is that the inferencing is going to be done at the edge much much of the data if not most of the data is going to stay at the edge yeah so this is what you're enabling through that integration provision heterogeneous combination of technologies correct I mean you know to use the extreme example that we talked about you know on stage earlier you know CERN has this massive amount of information that comes from the I think it's 40 million collisions a second or I may have my figures wrong and you cannot possibly store nor do you want to transmit that data and and so you you have to be applying AI to figure out what the good stuff is and there's no stream it's exactly and that solution exists in a myriad of applications you know the very you know simplistic one you're not going to send you know the picture of who's at your front door you know to a core data center to figure out if it's somebody in your family yeah you don't want to be doing that maybe not in the camera but certainly a lot closer because you just you know the network simply will not can't handle the capacity all right we got to go but but last word you know what are the takeaways from today what do you want our audience to remember from this event well I think you know I think it's just we continue to build on our memory and storage base to to move up the stack and add values in way that maybe storage subsystems like our our NAND SSD and 3d crosspoint that you know go a little further up the stack in terms of our gaining greater expertise in you know machine learning solutions or or the example with authentic of providing you know a broader solution including key management for how we secure the billions of devices they're gonna be at the edge touching all the bases Tom all right congratulations on all the hard work and it was great to see you again thanks guys Dave and Dave thank you and you keep right there but it will be back to wrap micron insight 2019 right after this short break from San Francisco you watching the cube

>>Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering my groin insight 2019 brought to you by micron. >>We're back at pier 27 in San Francisco. This is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage and we're covering micron insight 2019 I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost David Floyd and this event is kind of interesting. David, it basically intersperses cube interviews with big tent discussions, thought leadership, we've heard from automotive, healthcare and and 5g discussions and no Han is here. He's the vice president and CTO of the emerging business at Erickson. And you were just on a panel. Welcome to the cube. Thanks. Great to be here. You were talking about five G, we're going to talk about five G. so first of all, talking about the emerging business at Ericsson, >>your whole group, you know, so Ericsson, we, you know, 99 a lot of our business today has done what operators emerging business group, we're sort of looking at the intersection of industry, cloud computing, our traditional mobile network operator customers, and how do we, how do we put those together and look for new either products or business models. And really create something new for customers. >>So we tell him when he's talking about five G, everybody gets all excited. Certainly the technology community is excited about it. There's a whole value chain and an ecosystem that's that's pumping right along. The carriers are adopting and the users are just waiting. So what should we know about? >>So I, you know, I think there's a couple of different things. One is from a consumer perspective, you're definitely looking at faster, you know, better. All of the things we've got from the other GS at older things. You know, today, you know, faster downloads of movies. I think what we're, and I'm, I'm in the tech business, not in the prediction business, you know. So I think what we've learned from previous technologies is we almost don't know what the new applications are. We're trying to make the platform as easy as possible for developers to utilize what the network actually has to offer. So I think that's a big part of what we're trying to do. The other part is enhancing what you have today as a consumer is massive, but also industries is a huge pull on 5g. So we talked about industry four. Dot. Zero and really transforming industries and cutting the cables in production lines, allowing monitoring of systems that never happened before. >>A lot of use cases that can be out there. So a, I have a younger son of 22 and I look at my a bill every month. Yeah, I do have him downloading 10 times more data. It doesn't fill me with uh, duty or just the excise to carriers. I mean while we've seen with every, every end. And of course that was the question how much of a down, yeah, how much low is the price going to be on this baffled breeze you go to invest an awful lot. Absolutely. So I mean we're going to see it tens, 10 orders of magnitude cheaper. So even as it is now with 4g, we're seeing a lot of the unlimited plans coming available and so on. I think we're just going to see more of that. And then the question, actually a big question for five G is what will you pay for? >>You know, if we talk about age compute and low latency, if you're a gamer and I can give you X milliseconds of latency versus you know, a two X milliseconds, how much would you pay for that? So I think what we know at the moment is people will pay for that. We don't know exactly how much, and that's where you need the ecosystem and you need to get stuff out there. And actually some of the economic impact is fuzzy. But in thinking past, there's no prologue. But if you think about the other GS as they sort of were adopted, what can we learn from those? And how do you think five G will be different in terms of its adoption and economic impact? Let's say if you look at adoption, I mean just a number of contracts. We have the number of deployments we have globally, just off the charts in terms of where we are with 4g Korea launched and a few months ago, just just before the summer, within two months they had a million 5g subscribers with smart phones in their eyes and two months later they added a second million subscribers. >>I mean for a market to go from zero to that in, in that period of time with smartphones, if we go back to 4g, all of that was with dongles and sort of hotspots on routers, you know, so to jump directly to smartphones, huge adoption, it's going to happen fast. Well what do you, what are the sequence, what's the sequence of events that have to occur for adoption to really take off? >> So obviously you need to build out the networks and the operators are doing that are pretty high speed. You need to have the devices ready and all the devices. Now it's not like you have a 5g only device. It's obviously capable of all the four G things. And then it's better when you have 5g. So the devices are going to come and take and fast. So all your new devices, most of the high end devices have 5g capability already in there. >>Um, and then the networks just getting built out more and more. And then of course the application developers actually understanding how can I take advantage of those new capabilities? And then you'll start to see, okay, wow, you know, I didn't, this wasn't possible before. It's not just a faster download. It's really, there's just new experiences happening >> from a development standpoint. How much access do they have to the technology? Do they have to wait until this is all built out? Obviously not, but, but, but what's the status of sort of the devs? So we're, we're trying to, and we're working with a lot of the ecosystem. We have, we call it the D 15 studio in our Santa Clara office. We're bringing developers in there and really trying to understand, because you know, we talk Telekom as well. So we want to expose things. We want to understand, do you know what variable, if we say quality of service, what does that mean for you? You know, how do you translate that? So, and we're working with, you know, the cloud players where to developers live to some extent to bring in that ecosystem and understand how it all plays together. So >>ahead. Yup. Um, so if really, if you're looking at it longterm, obviously it's going to happen, but the experience is as I go around the States, is that you've got all these different four G three GS edges still in a very, very patchy a level of it. Is this going to be different? Is this going to actually go into different places because there's a big investment that has to be made, a lot of things very close together. Yes, yes. That seems to be a recipe for everything being or right in the cities. But as soon as you go outside the urban areas, it's going to be very patchy. How does that compare, for example, with Elon Musk's idea of a doing stuff from the sky? >>Well, everything comes down to economics. So you know, it's, it's obviously you're going to have denser deployments in the cities, then you are in the countryside and so on. One of the big advantages would 5g is am, and not to get too deep into the technical part, but you can use all the spectrum that's available. And spectrum is super important as we get, you know, when we have lower frequency spectrum, you can cover a hundred miles Wade, one base station as you get to the millimeter wave, which is you get super high bandwidth, then you're add hundreds of meters. Yeah. And so obviously one is more suitable for a rural environment, the other is more suitable for. So for an urban environment, so obviously having those working together in one technology allows you to deploy everything and get the benefits in a much broader area than we had for any of the previous. >>There's choice there in terms of how you deploy or, or leverage the spectrum. So you're saying that the higher performance end of the spectrum, it's gonna require a greater density of other components. And absolutely. When people talk about oil, there's going to be a lot more distributed, you know, pieces of the five G network that has to get built out. So who does that? Who's putting those pieces of the value chain in? So different players, obviously the mobile network operators, the 18 Ts and Verizons of the world are doing a lot of the heavy lifting and know what our support to actually put the, the radios and the towers in place. And then there's an edge compute piece as well, which is different players are putting in that. Um, so, so a lot of that infrastructure has been done. I think one thing that we've been pushing quite a lot, all our install base of radios is um, 5g upgradable via software. >>So that means that a lot of the already installed, uh, radios and infrastructure, you're just softer upgrade, you know, an hour later it's now 5g ready. So I think that's a big piece of basin. Back to your question of how quickly and and can reach all those areas, are there any specific commercial blockers that you see, um, that you're thinking through? I am I, I think the, just understanding some of the more challenging when you look at, if you're deploying edge compute and you have to invest billions and really getting that far out to the edge, I think there's some questions still there. Like I said, how much would you pay for 20 milliseconds versus 15 milliseconds. And that might sound like a lot, but that's a lot of extra infrastructure you would need to put out. So I think that's still being worked true. >>And obviously some of that will happen quicker in a downtown San Francisco than it will in a, you know, middle of Nevada plays well and the others that you've mentioned before, it's unclear what new applications are going to emerge here. And so it's almost like build it and they will come and then we'll figure it out and then we'll figure out how to charge for it. Like you say the gamers, how much will they pay for it? Yeah, so those are some of the uncertainties but they'll shake themselves out. So absolutely. I was a pretty smart about doing. What about micron and the role of memory players and storage players? How will this affect them? Eight say a huge opportunity when you ah, yeah, I mean invest no and Bardy hats. >> Yeah, I think it's a, when you look at the number of devices and, okay, what's the device? >>The devices are smartphone. Well the devices now your car, it's every IOT device and down to your toaster and all the crazy stuff people are talking about too. I mean to every industrial application tool that age, computers. So you're distributing now a lot of different compute memory storage across different parts of the network. So I mean they talked earlier in the panel about phones having terabytes of data. You know, it's in, it's just unimaginable. The amount of data storage. Remember you're going to need in a vehicle, you know, they're looking at terabytes per hour of data and then how much of that should they shift off the vehicle? How much did it keep there? So huge opportunity. >> Well, I'd be willing to pay for, um, some memory in my appliances. They tell me when they're going to break. I just got a new dishwasher and I can program it with my, my remote. I don't want to program. I just want to know that on Thanksgiving morning it was that it works. But in a week before it's going to break, I want to know so I can deal with vending and maintenance. That's a big use case. Can't wait until that happens. The last question, so >>I was going to be, I was following up on that last point you were making. Um, uh, so again, this cost of everything, this, this value that you're going to get out of it. Um, it seems to me that, um, that this is gonna take a long time to push out. Um, and, and before it actually down. And people will actually know whether they can pay for this. And then one thing in particular is there's a lot of resistance in, in the, in the States anyway, to all of these devices being put very, very close, you know, to the, to, to it for example, putting all the devices down, download a row for example, that, that, that seems to be very expensive and, and going to get a lot of reaction from consumers is, is that not the case? >>So I actually, we're not seeing it that much. I mean if you look across the globe, um, China obviously is a slightly unique situation. Massive deployments already happening there. Like I said, Southeast Asia, South Korea being among the, you know, the forefront, big deployments already there. And we're seeing big pull from industries already and the operators here in U S are announcing new cities, you know, every month practically. So they are really full on into this. And to some extent it's, it's really just, there's a capacity need to have the spectrum. They need to make the investments and they're, they're doing it as we speak. >>So I think it depends on me. Why was it a meeting the other day in Boston with a lot of city officials and folks that worked for the mayor's office? They're envisioning Boston, you know, for the next 50 years, smart cities and five G was like, if you did a word cloud 5g was that the number one topic? You know, we talked earlier about sports stadiums. You can see that being, you know, use cases going to be these >>hotspots where it's of very, very high >>of the city in this case in Boston's case are they're going to invest, right? And they're gonna think that's going to be a differentiator for cities. >>You have this amazing infrastructure, you know, five G infrastructure that allows you to take advantage of that, be it just from, they talked about traffic congestion and what the city can do and then what the businesses and the consumers can do in that area that that can end up being a differentiator for innovation companies going there and so on. >>Right. All right. We're going to go before they blow us out. No, thanks very much for coming to the queue very much. All right, great. To have you on. I keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break. You're watching the cube live from micron insight 2019 from San Francisco right back.

>>live from San Francisco. It's the Q covering Micron Insight 2019 to You by Micron. >>Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. We're here. Appear 27 covering the micron inside. 2019. I'm David Lot day with my co host, David Flores. Sanjay Moreau chose here. He's the president and CEO of Micron. Sanjay, great to see you again. Good to >>see you, too. >>I love the show because you guys are a highly technical company. You get you get down in the weeds and talk about nano meters and cycles and things like that. But we're here talking about technology, how it's changing people's lives. I mean, you see, that is your mission. So tell us a year on what's new from this >>event. You new at this event is so many new products that we announced today. You know, you see, Micron, I'd like to say that my clone 41 year old, but it has a new heart beat and you see that new heartbeat coming through New innovations, new products, you know, several new solid state drive solutions. Breakthrough speeds portable. SSD renounced our tent, a security solution as well as demonstrated test platform a platform for deep learning algorithms to be applied, enabling influence at EJ. So you see my front continuing to focus on driving high value solutions, engaging deeper with the ecosystem, engaging with our customers to understand what are the main points off the future and bringing innovative technology solutions. And, of course, during the course of last year in a while it was a year where memory pricing went down substantially because of some excess supply forces demand. But my crone, actually in that year produced the second best year in the history of the company. And during the year, he also had the second best year for free class cash flow for the company, >>about $13 billion in nearly 12 months. I want to get into some of that. But before I do our industry and you know this well has marched to the cadence of Moore's law for decades and decades of that has been the innovation engine. It no longer is. You talked about that on your panel today, the innovation engine is now data applying machine intelligence and a I and machine learning to that data scaling with cloud. Now the edge comes into a whole new innovation cocktail. I wonder if you could comment on that in terms of what it means for your business. >>So, yes, in terms of innovation, challenges you to Morse law scaling, but also the workloads that are there today, driving the eye of the future required, nor the solutions of yesterday. They require new, innovative architectures. I like to call them be spoke processors like you have a new custom suit for that fits a particular individual. Now baseball processors that actually meet needs off the specific workloads. But what is important is that as these new innovations, new architectures proliferate through the ecosystem. Memory and storage is key because the trends off the eye, after all, are about drawing deeper insight and creating greater value from all the data that billions of devices the coyote devices are creating around the world. So tremendous support unity for memory and storage. We are focused on bringing solutions with Denham with flash that meet the needs of our customers in terms of performance be announced today. You know the highest clocking speed for our ballistics. Dylan. You know, a delight to the gamers, but we also announce new SS D's for enterprise application, we announce a three d cross point x 100 solid state drive with the fastest in the industry kind of performance. So these are the kind of things were focused on. Yes, technology is getting more complex in and, you know, event from 64 layers to 96 layers. And next year, going 228 layers on Dedham side were the first ones to introduce the ones e technology Norden the industry and actually forced ones to start shipping already in production in the industry. This one z dina nor has the smallest feature size. So these are new, exciting things that are happening at my crime. >>I mean, Sanjay's right. They see all these alternative processes going on. You see, cos tech companies building their own custom silicon, right? I mean, >>so yes, way we're seeing these hybrid solutions being put together on dhe, seeing that the rise of new players completely like arm, for example, now taking a more and more important part in that. So But I'd like to just ask one question on three D cross point that that was an interesting one. How you gonna get volume in that is there going to be through working with some of these other vendors? Because Intel have just combined it with The process is essentially, Are you looking at new ways that you can use that at the lower end to get volume up? >>Where's that fit in your overall strategy? >>Certainly, as we said in the memory hierarchy, TV Cross Point fits in very nicely between NAND on one end and Di Dam on the other end city cost point as a persistent memory gives the benefit that it has capacities, ship densities that can be higher than Denham. Yet it has performance that is close to Denham and much faster than then. And it has the persistence, the non volatility that man has as well. So you can imagine with those kind of attributes, it will have exciting new opportunities in the future. But these new technologies do take several years before they become mainstream technologies. This is still early innings for three D plus point technology. Be engaged with the ecosystem partners with the customers in terms of understanding how this will fit in best in terms of their data center applications. This is what we have started working on This is what we announced the product. And we'll, of course, continue to evolve. The road map are pretty cross point technology. I just also want to touch upon what you said that Yes, you do see that compute now is not being just done like yesterday with CP use. Yes, you do have that idea of solutions. Si pues gp used tp use a six and f bjs. And here's some of the social media giants and those tech giants that are driving innovation in various industry segments, including transportation. They have their own silicon, you know, to address their deep learning requirements, and that creates new. Unfortunately, for us, this is what we call putting silicon back into Silicon Valley. Silicon is driving the innovations today that are coming out of Silicon Valley, regardless off world and market segment and Member Lee and storage is very much at the heart is at the center of yours. >>So you know I want to retire about vertical integration and one of my business early business heroes was Al Shugart. When I was a young puppet, i d. C. And he educated me on the importance of vertical integration and his market, which of course, was spinning destroys heads, media, etcetera. That was a game changer for that that you know, emerging company at the time. See gate. How is vertical? What your philosophy and vertical integration And how does it affect your business and your customers? >>So vertical indication enables us to bring value to our customers, bring greater value to our customers. We have a massive scale off manufacturing that is built on a very comprehensive and actually the world's most unique technology platform. Now taking this vertical integration of the technology platform manufacturing scales off, you know, more than six million acres a year and extending it to controller and form their expertise deep packaging expertise to bring high bandwidth Delia memory solutions for data center applications as well. A solid state drives and multi chip manage nan solutions for smartphone and automotive applications. These are just examples off how we're leveraging our vertical integration, extending it into controllers and firmware and packaging and assembly capability to really bring a diverse and expanded product for a full year to the market, do air just the markets needs from cloud to the edge. And now we're extending our work till indication capabilities even deeper from we have gone from silicon two solutions and now going from also silicon. Two solutions to system and software working with customers to understand water, the hardware and software intricacies involved that can help bring out even more power from the memory as they look at, you know, driving their deep learning algorithms for training as well as for influence. I think this is the vertical integration on build on the most unique platform of technologies. Nobody else in the world has Denham, NAND and CD cross point now building vertical indication on this gives us tremendous defense created opportunity to bring value to our cast. >>A troll more value or being able leveraged. I wanna ask you about your business. You mentioned a record number two free cash flow year for you guys. Two summers ago, I listened to you at the analyst, the Wall Street analyst meetings in you. We're very much aware of the demand and supply pending imbalance that was coming. And you said at the time we're gonna manage through that much better than we have. Historically, it reminds me of airlines when you go when you fly now there's no empty seats, so and you've done a masterful job. The stock prices stayed up. Now, granted, you know you've reduced share count. But how have you done that? What is the new discipline that has allowed you to navigate through those icebergs? >>Soviet Full focus on accelerating our technology development. We're focused on making, for example, technology development exploration. I mentioned earlier being the forest to the market with one C D M, which has the smallest feature size, right. That ability to accelerate technology development and deploy it in production to meet our CUSTOMERSNEEDS gives us ability to manage cost reduction ability as well. So Micron has actually in terms of cost reductions on a year over year basis has led the industry both on the same side as well as the NAN site. This has contributed to stronger financial performance of the company. During 2019 there, prices came down due to some excess supply in the industry, and yet Micron, due to its healthy cost position, was able to produce better financial results as well. Another very important element is increasing the mics off high value solutions, infusing the mics off SS D's and Managed man for mobile applications, as well as bringing more high performance memory to the Bennett, did a memory to the benefit of our customers. High value solutions, Cost positioning, technology acceleration. These have bean the elements that will give us long lasting advantage in terms of continuing to weather the potential ups and downs in our industry. And, you know, yes, we're proud of the fact that, unlike in the past, in an environment like will be experienced in 2019 with respect to price declines, Micron would have had media challenges Micron actually delivered, as I said, the second best year in terms of revenues profits as well as free cash flow. And I want to highlight that we narrowed the gap with our competitors. We narrow the gap with our competitors in terms of orbital margin again as a result, off a stronger, more diversified high value product portfolio and our cost reduction capabilities. >>Yeah, and you've also done a great job communicating to Wall Street. So my last question I know you gotta go is around tech for good. Mark Betty of's been really front center on this. You said that are really jar job is to make lives better, because I still say your job is to increase shareholder value as well. Whoa is the CEO who Mrs 4/4 in a row, but then points to tech for good at the same time. New new workers millennials expect checked for good. How do you see those fitting together? What's your philosophy? There >>were very passionate at Micron that it is important for us that we support the communities that be working where our team members 11. Yes, we want to dry for betterment of humanity through bringing the benefit off our technologies and products, you know? And of course, you see your life's changed with the benefit of more memory and storage, whether it is in your smart home or your smartphone or all of the benefits that you're getting from advances in technology today. But we also absolutely have a social responsibility going from customers to communities, really making sure that we had a good corporate citizen. So at my crone, philanthropy is important doing this year. A microloan foundation is matching our team members contributions, and through that through our team member contributions as well as our match, we have given two and 1/2 $1,000,000 to the communities during the course of the year. We have also supported several new initiatives related to stem education as well as basic human needs again in all the countries and sites where micro nasty members. And actually Micron Foundation has given $11 million during our fiscal year 2019 for supporting various causes toward basic human needs, as well as advancement of science, technology and generating and map. And, most importantly, microphone team members more white have contributed 165,000 hours in community giving, volunteering activities, and we are trying to continue to take our engagement with the community to the next level. I considered it very, very important that and our responsibility that is not only about producing best business results, but we need to help our communities and people in need get to the next level off betterment as well. And it's part of there's diversity and inclusion and equality is a very, very important initiative at the company as well. And we're making tremendous progress in that respect as well. That's >>a great story, Sanjay. Thanks. Um I know you're super busy. Get a bunch of customers to see you're an awesome CEO and doing a great job. Really appreciate you taking the time to come on the Cube. Thank you. Thank you >>for being here with you today. >>Fantastic. All right. Thank you for watching. Everybody will be right back with our next guest. Live from Micron inside. 2019. You're watching the Cube?

>>live from San Francisco. It's the Q covering Micron Insight 2019 >>Not to You, by Micron. >>Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. This is a Micron Insight 2019 and you're watching the Cube, the leader in live coverage on Day Volonte with my co host, David Floyd. Di Mooney is here. She's the executive director of Micron gives. That's right. Give us the story. What's happening with Micron gives Tech for good. We love the tech for good stories. Tech companies are really taking this seriously. This is not just lip service. Give us the update. >>That's right. That's right. We're so proud of our company that they established a foundation 20 years ago to give back to our global communities. And since then we have given $115 million away and over 10,000 grands. So we have seen a lot of different opportunities in our global communities, and it's just been fabulous that our company supports >>you talk today about water dot or what's going on there. Why is that important in what your role there. >>So what we did is we started taking a look at an organization that we have. We have started recently binning beam or engaged with basic human needs and the grants that those support And when we were taking a look at, Really, what is the primary basic human need? Way discovered? It really is the need for water, and there are millions of people that cannot access this precious resource, and it's just was really surprising to us to think way, take it for granted so much. But yet it is very difficult to get. So as we took a look at this, there was a lot of information that this organization collects. And so we thought, Well, this will be a great opportunity for us to utilize information to enrich and bring in some of our advanced computing expertise along with our philanthropy, help them reach their mission even greater. >>This is huge. I was an event earlier this week, and the keynote speaker was an ultra marathoner, and he literally at one point he ran 4500 miles across the continent of Africa. He and two other ultra runners and people were asking what was The biggest challenge was that the heat was the painting. You know, the biggest challenge was see the challenges of of the community's getting part of the water. That was the number one thing that you know. He left the impression So I mean, this is a huge global problem. >>It really is. And our manufacturing operations were global, and we are located in water scarce areas of the world. And so what really became you know, it's a Micron issue to one of our biggest environmental issues that we talked about, and water dot org's has just been a >>leader in this space, and it has been just fabulous to work with on >>really, they have so much passion and dedication towards this. They've been ableto help. 22 million people already. >>All right, so they're lining up for the main stage. Just give us real quick some of the grants that you guys have. >>Last year at this event, we announced our advancing curiosity, and we announced three recipients last year, and since then we have four more. That's U C L. A. All right T, University of Texas at Austin and University of Washington. >>Awesome. That's great. Listen, congratulations. D on all your great work. We really appreciate your ticket sometime in the queue. All right, and thank you for watching her body. We're back with our next guest from Micron inside. 2019 on the Cube, right back.

>>Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering my groin. Insight 2019 brought to you by micron. >>Welcome back to pier 27 in San Francisco. I'm your host Dave Vellante with my cohost David foyer and this is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our live coverage of micron insight 2019 we were here last year talking about some of the big picture trends. Derek ticker is here, he's the general manager and vice president of the storage business unit at micro and great to see you again. Thank you so much for having me here. Welcome. So you know we talk about the super powers a lot, you know, cloud data, AI and these new workloads that are coming in. And this, this, I was talking to David earlier in our kickoff like how real is AI? And it feels like it's real. It's not just a bunch of vendor industry hype and it comes in a lot of different forms. Derek, what are you seeing in terms of the new workloads and the big trends in artificial intelligence? >>I think just on the, on the front end, you guys are absolutely right. The, the role of artificial intelligence in the world is, uh, is absolutely transformational. I was sitting in a meeting in the last couple of days and somebody was walking through a storyline that I have to share with you. That's a perfect example of why this is becoming mainstream. In Southern California at a children's hospital, there were a set of parents that had a few days old baby and this baby was going through seizures and no one could figure out what it was. And during the periods of time of the seizure, the child's brain activity was zero. There was no brain activity whatsoever. And what they did is they performed a CT scan, found nothing, check for infections, found nothing. And can you imagine a parent just sitting there dealing with their child and that situation, you feel hopeless. >>This particular institution is so much on the bleeding edge. They've been investing in personalized medicine and essentially what they were able to do was extract a sample of blood from that sample of blood within a matter of minutes. They were able to run an algorithm that could sift through 5 million genetic variants to go find a potential match for a genetic variant that existed within this child. They found one that was 0.01% of the population found a tiny, tiny, call it a less than a needle in the haystack. And what they were able to do is translate that actual insight into a treatment. And that treatment wasn't invasive. It didn't involve surgery. It involves supplements and providing this shower, just the nutrients that he needed to combat this genetic variant. But all of this was enabled through technology and through artificial intelligence in general. And a big part of the show that we're here at today is to talk about the industry coming together and discussing what are the great advances that are happening in that domain. >>It's just, it's super exciting to see something that touches that close to our life. I love that story and that's, that's why I love this event. I mean, well, obviously micron memories, you know, DRAM, NAND, et cetera, et cetera. But this event is all about connecting to the impacts on our lives. You take, you take that, I used to ask this question a lot of when will machines be able to make better diagnoses than, than doctors. And I think, you know, a lot people say, well they already can, but the real answer is it's really about the augmentation. Yeah. You know, machines helping doctors get to that, you know, very, you know, uh, a small probability 0.1001% yes. And it'd be able to act on it. That's really how AI is affecting our lives every day. >> Wholeheartedly agree. And actually that's a, that's a big part of our mission. >>Our mission is to transform how the world uses information to enrich life. That's the heart and soul of what you just described. Yeah. And we're actually, we're super excited about what we see happening in storage as a result of this. Um, one of the, one of the things that we've noticed as we've gotten engaged with a broad host of customers in the industry is that there's a lot of focus on artificial intelligence workloads being handled based on memory and memory bandwidth and larger amounts of memory being required. If you look at systems of today versus systems of tomorrow, based on the types of workloads that are evolving from machine learning, the need for DRAM is growing dramatically. Multiple factors, we see that, but what nobody ever talks about or rarely talks about is what's going on in the storage subsystem and one of the biggest issues that we've found over time or challenges that exist is as you look at the AI workloads going back to 2014 the storage bandwidth required was a few megabytes per second and called tens of, but if you just look every year, over time we're exceeding at gigabyte, two gigabytes of bandwidth required out of the storage subsystem. >>Forget the memory. The storage is being used as a cash in it flushes, but once you get into a case where you actually want to do more work on a given asset, which of course everybody wants to do from a TCO perspective, you need super high performance and capability. One of the things that that we uncovered was by delivering an SSD. This is our 9,300 drive. We actually balanced both the read IOPS and the ride IOPS at three gigs per second. And what we allow to have happened is not just what you can imagine as almost sequential work. You load up a bunch of data into a, into a training machine, the machine goes and processes on it, comes back with a result, load more data in by actually having a balanced read and write a model. Your ingest times go faster. So while you're working on a sequence, you can actually ingest more data into the system and it creates this overall efficiency. And it's these types of things that I think provided a great opportunity for innovation in the storage domain for these types of that's working >> requiring new architectures in storage, right? I mean, yeah, >>I mean, th th so one of the things that's happened in, in bringing SSDs in is that the old protocols were very slow, etc. And now we all the new protocols within in Vme and potentially even more new protocols coming in, uh, into this area. What's micron? What, how is micron making this thing happen? This speed that's gonna provide these insights? >>It's a fan fan. Fantastic question and you're absolutely right. The, the world of standards is something that we found over the course of time. If you can get a group of industry players wrapped around a given set of standards, you can create a large enough market and then people can innovate on top of that. And for us in the, in the storage domain, the big transitions had been in Sada and NBME. You see that happening today when we talked a little bit about maybe a teaser for what's coming a little later at, at our event, um, in some of the broader areas in the market, we're talking about how fabrics attach storage and infrastructure. And interestingly enough, where people are innovating quite a bit right now is around using the NBME infrastructure over fabrics themselves, which allows for shared storage across a network as opposed to just within a given server there. >>There's some fantastic companies that are out there that are actually delivering both software stacks and hardware accelerators to take advantage of existing NBME SSDs. But the protocol itself gets preserved. But then they can share these SSDs over a network, which takes a scenario where before you were locked with your storage stranded within a server and now you can actually distribute more broad. It's amazing difference, isn't it at that potential of looking at data over as broad an area as you want to. Absolutely. And being able to address it directly and having it done with standards and then having it done with low enough latency such that you aren't feeling severely disadvantaged, taking that SSD out of a box and making it available across a broad network. So you guys have a huge observation space. Uh, you sell storage to the enterprise, you sell storage to the cloud everywhere. >>I want to ask you about the macro because when you look at the traditional storage suppliers, you know, some of them are struggling right now. There aren't many guys that are really growing and gaining share because the cloud is eating away at that. You guys sell to the cloud. So that's fine. Moving, you know, arms dealer, whoever wins it may the best man win. Um, but, but at the same time, customers have ingested so much all flash. It's giving them head room and so they're like, Hey, I'm good for awhile. I used to have this spinning disc. I'd throw spinning disc at it at the problem till I said, give me performance headroom. That has changed. Now we certainly expect a couple of things that that will catch up and there'll be another step function. But there's also elasticity. Yes. Uh, you saw for instance, pure storage last quarter said, wow, hit the price dropped so fast, it actually hurt our revenues. >>And you'd say, well, wait a minute. If the price drops, we want people to buy more. There's no question that they will. It just didn't happen fast enough from the quarter. All of these interesting rip currents going on. I wonder what you're seeing in terms of the overall macro. Yeah. It's actually a fantastic question. If you go back in time and you look at the number of sequential quarters, when we had ASP decreases across the industry, it was more than six. And the duration from peak to trough on the spot markets was high double digit percentages. Not many markets go through that type of a transition. But as you suggested, there's this notion of elasticity that exists, which is once the price gets below a certain threshold, all of a sudden new markets open up. And we're seeing that happen today. We're seeing that happen in the client space. >>So, so these devices actually, they're going through this transition where companies are actually saying, you know what, we're going to design out the hard drive cages for all platforms across our portfolio going into the future. That's happening now. And it's happening largely because these price points are enabling that, that situation and the enterprise a similar nature in terms of average capacities and drives being deployed over time. So it's, I told you, I think the last time we saw John, I told just one of the most exciting times to be in the memory and storage industry. I'll hold true to that today. I, I'm super excited about it, but I just bought a new laptop and, and you know, I have, you know, a half a half a terabyte today and they said for 200 bucks you can get a terabyte. Yes. And so I said, Oh wow, I could take everything from 1983 and bring it, bring it over. >>Yeah. Interestingly, it was back ordered, you know, so I think, wow, it am I the only one, but this is going to happen. I mean, everybody's going to have, you know, make the price lower. Boom. They'll buy more. We, we, we believe that to be the case for the foreseeable future. Okay. Do you see yourself going in more into the capacity market as well with SSTs and I mean, this, this, this drop, let's do big opportunity or, yeah. Actually, you know, one of the areas that we feel particularly privileged to be able to, to engage in is the, the use of QLC technology, right. You know, quad level solar for bits per cell technology. We've integrated this into a family of, uh, of SSDs for the enterprise, or interestingly enough, we have an opportunity to displace hard drives at an even faster rate because the core capability of the products are more power efficient. >>They've got equal to, or better performance than existing hard drives. And when you look at the TCO across a Reed intensive workloads, it's actually, it's a no brainer to go replace those HDD workloads in the client space. There's segments of the market where we're seeing QLC to play today for higher, higher capacity value segments. And then there's another segment for performance. So it's actually each segment is opening up in a more dramatic way. So the last question, I know you got some announcements today. They haven't hit the wire yet, but what, can you show us a little leg, Derrick? What can you tell us? So I, I'll, I'll give you this much. The, um, the market today, if you go look in the enterprise segment is essentially NBME and SATA and SAS. And if you look at MDME in 20 2019 essential wearing crossover on a gigabyte basis, right? >>And it's gonna grow. It's gonna continue to grow. I mentioned earlier the 9,300 product that we use for machine learning, AI workloads, super high performance. There's a segment of the market that we haven't announced products in today that is a, a a mainstream portion of that market that looks very, very interesting to us. In addition, we can never forget that transitions in the enterprise take a really long time, right, and Sada is going to be around for a long time. It may be 15% of the market and 10% out a few years, but our customers are being very clear. We're going to continue to ship Satta for an extended period of time. The beautiful thing about about micron is we have wonderful 96 layer technology. There's a need in the market and both of the segments I described, and that's about as much as I can give you, I don't bet against data. Derek, thanks very much for coming on. Thank you guys so much. You're welcome. There's a lot of facts. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back at micron insight 2019 from San Francisco. You're watching the cube.

>>live from San Francisco. It's the Q covering Micron Insight 2019. Brought to you by Micron. >>Welcome back to Pier 27 sentences. You're beautiful day here. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage recovering micron inside 2019 hashtag micron in sight. My co host, David Floy er and I are pleased to welcome Michael Wood, Acre Cube alum and a fellow at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Michael, good to see you again. Thanks. Coming on. >>Thanks for having me. >>So you're welcome? So you're talking about HBC on a panel today? But of course, your role inside of HP is is a wider scope. Talk about that a little bit. >>She also I'm the lead technologists in our Compute Solutions business unit that pack out Enterprise. So I've come from the group that worked on in memory computing the Superdome flex platform around things like traditional enterprise computing s it, Hannah. But I'm now responsible not only for that mission critical solutions platform, but also looking at our blades and edge line businesses. Well said broader technology. >>Okay. And then, of course, today we're talking a lot about data, the growth of data and As you say, you're sitting on a panel talking about high performance computing and the impact on science. What are you seeing? One of the big trends in terms of the intersection between data in the collision with H. P. C and science. >>So what we're seeing is just this explosion of data and this really move from traditionally science of space around how you put equations into supercomputers. Run simulations. You test your theories out, look at results. >>Come back in a couple weeks, >>exactly a potential years. Now. We're seeing a lot of work around collecting data from instruments or whether it's genomic analysis, satellite observations of the planner or of the universe. These aerial generating data in vast quantities, very high rates. And so we need to rethink how we're doing our science to gain insights from this massive data increase with seeing, >>you know, when we first started covering the 10th year, the Cuban So in 2010 if you could look at the high performance computing market as sort of an indicator of some of the things that were gonna happen in so called big data, and some of those things have played out on I think it probably still is a harbinger. I wonder, how are you seeing machine intelligence applied to all this data? And what can we learn from that? In your opinion, in terms of its commercial applications. >>So a CZ we'll know this massive data explosion is how do we gain insights from this data? And so, as I mentioned, we serve equations of things like computational fluid dynamics. But now things are progressing, so we need to use other techniques to gain understanding. And so we're using artificial intelligence and particularly today, deep learning techniques to basically gain insights from the state of Wei. Don't have equations that we can use to mind this information. So we're using these aye aye techniques to effectively generate the algorithms that can. Then you bring patterns of interest to our you know, focused of them, really understand what is the scientific phenomenon that's driving the things particular pattern we're seeing within the data? So it's just beyond the ability of the number of HPC programmers, we have the sort of traditional equation based methodologies algorithms to gain insight. We're moving into this world where way just have outstripped knowledge and capabilities to gain insight. >>So So how does that? How is that being made possible? What are the differences in the architecture that you've had to put in, for example, to make this sort of thing possible? >>Yeah, it's it's really interesting time, actually, a few years ago seemed like computing was starting to get boring because wears. Now we've got this explosion of new hardware devices being built, basically moving into the more of a hetero genius. Well, because we have this expo exponential growth of data. But traditional computing techniques are slowing down, so people are looking at exaggerate er's to close that gap and all sorts of hatred genius devices. So we've really been thinking. How do we change that? The whole computing infrastructure to move from a compute centric world to a memory centric world? And how can we use memory driven computing techniques to close that gap to gain insight, so kind of rethinking the whole architectural direction basically merge, sort of collapsing down the traditional hierarchy you have, from storage to memory to the CPU to get rid of the legacy bottlenecks in converting protocols from process of memory storage down to just a simple basically memory driven architecture where you have access to the entire data set you're looking at, which could be many terabytes to pad of eyes to exabytes that you can do simple programming. Just directly load store to that huge data set to gain insights. So that's that's really changed. >>Fascinating, isn't it? So it's the Gen Z. The hope of Gen Z is actually taking place now. >>Yes, so Gen Z is an industry led consulting around a memory fabric and the, you know, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Onda whole host of industry partners, a part of the ecosystem looking at building a memory fabric where people can bring different innovations to operate, whether it's processing types, memory types, that having that common infrastructure. I mean, there's other work to in the industry the Compute Express Link Consortium. So there's a lot of interest now in getting memory semantics out of the process, er into a common fabric for people to innovate. >>Do you have some examples of where this is making a difference now, from from the work in the H B and your commercial work? >>Certainly. Yeah, we're working with customers in areas like precision medicine, genomex basically exaggerating the ability to gain insights into you know what medical pathway to go on for a particular disease were working in cybersecurity. Looking at how you know, we're worried about security of our data and things like network intrusion. So we're looking at How can you gain insights not only into known attacking patterns on a network that the unknown patents that just appearing? So we're actually a flying machine learning techniques on sort of graft data to understand those things. So there's there's really a very broad spectrum where you can apply these techniques to Data Analytics >>are all scientists now, data scientists. And what's the relationship between sort of a classic data scientist, where you think of somebody with stats and math and maybe a little bit of voting expertise and a scientist that has much more domain expertise you're seeing? You see, data scientists sort of traversed domains. How are those two worlds coming together? >>It's funny you mentioned I had that exact conversation with one of the members of the Cosmos Group in Cambridge is the Stephen Hawking's cosmology team, and he said, actually, he realized a couple of years ago, maybe he should call himself a day two scientists not cosmologist, because it seemed like what he was doing was exactly what you said. It's all about understanding their case. They're taking their theoretical ideas about the early universe, taking the day to measurements from from surveys of the sky, the background, the cosmic background radiation and trying to pair these together. So I think your data science is tremendously important. Right now. Thio exhilarate you as they are insights into data. But it's not without you can't really do in isolation because a day two scientists in isolation is just pointing out peaks or troughs trends. But how do you relate that to the underlying scientific phenomenon? So you you need experts in whatever the area you're looking at data to work with, data scientists to really reach that gap. >>Well, with all this data and all this performance, computing capacity and almost all its members will be fascinating to see what kind of insights come out in the next 10 years. Michael, thanks so much for coming on. The Cube is great to have you. >>Thank you very much. >>You're welcome. And thank you for watching. Everybody will be right back at Micron Insight 2019 from San Francisco. You're watching the Cube

>>live from San Francisco. It's the Q covering Micron Insight 2019 to You by Micron. >>We're back to Pier 27 in lovely San Francisco, Everybody. I'm Dave a lot with my co host, David Floy Er and you're watching the Cube, the leader and live tech coverage. Evan cursed Ellis here. He's a social digital influencer. First time in the Cube. Evan, Great to see you. >>Thanks for having me. First time's the best. >>You Very well. And it is beautiful. Out him in October is the best month in San Francisco. Way better way warmer than July. I mean, you live out here. Holy cow. All right, let's get right into it. You're just fresh off of mobile work. World Congress down in L. A. >>This morning. Yeah, five g on the brain's >>s. So what do we need to know about five g? You >>know, I think my big takeaway as an industry observer is that five g Israel, and it's now I mean, we've seen 5 10 years, maybe of hype, an expectation and marketing buzz and even spin. But I think we're now in the business of practical deployments, scaling rollouts of networks and that's, you know, as a industry observers, quite exciting. >>So what is five g mean for the average user? I mean, is it gonna be like going from dial up toe, high speed Internet or, you know, it's gonna be interesting. >>The average user, I think we'll experience, you know, like a 10 x increase in their current experience on mobile in terms of uploads and downloads and speed and Leighton see, And that kind of thing, which is super exciting, it's it's gonna blow people's mind. >>An ex stoked to get a 10 extra. When can I get this? >>It's when and it's where, right? I mean, if you look at how these networks are evolving, there are hundreds of thousands of small cells of base stations that have to be deployed naturally to get five G ubiquitous across the country. So it's it's when it's where it's how. But we're here. We're at the starting point and look for the next years and months ahead to see that riel attraction. >>If I look now when I travel around the country, I still have four G. I still have three g. I still have edge. I have a ll the old ones are still there, and it's taken forever, even just to get to 40. So isn't lesson. Isn't the rollout of this going to take a long time ago or 10 year horizon? >>I think, to get ubiquitous coverage indoor, outdoor, suburban, urban, rural It's going to take 10 years. But if you look at those hot spots that generate a lot of activity, whether it's, you know, indoor coverage in the Enterprise, whether it's, you know, the Bruins playing in Boston Garden I mean those air where five G is really going to come into play first and then it's going to sort of go outside of those urban dense areas. >>You mean like the fan experience in the fan experience in the venue >>is huge? I mean, if you go to any you know, baseball, basketball, football game, you know what the experience is like Pretty pretty bad, right? So horrible. So those kind of hot spots are ripe for five g like right away today. Now, >>so by the way, David, sometimes I get five g on my that's right, and I feel like it's fake. Five years like HD ready. What's that all about? Well, you know, >>these networks evolve, and so the carriers are maximizing for G, including biggest speed on four G and five. Gene is really if overlay to these existing networks. And so, as you get your next Samsung, you know five G enabled devices. Apple next year comes out with a five G iPad. You'll then begin to use. The service is as you use your existing device. >>Can you help us understand the fundamental architecture of five G? My understanding is it's, you know, no basis more distributed on. That's part of the reason why it's taking so long to roll out. But what do we need to know about that E? >>I think it's a brand new editor interface. So if you think about the current radio on for G, they reinvented the wheel with five G, which means you can support a huge number of endpoints of I o. T devices of wearables of home access points. And so it enables almost a 10 to 100 ex war devices in terms of scale. So while the end user may think this is business as usual, what's really happening on the network side is pretty revolutionary And once the networks are primed and built and ready, what's gonna be happening on the device side is gonna be really extraordinary. You're talking about a K A video on a mobile device or augmented reality through in new kinds of glasses. And so it's sort of a chicken and a little bit. You know what? She's gonna come first, the network or the incredible new devices. So we're seeing now the network's being put in place for those wave of devices, >>which makes sense. Device manufactures don't want over rotate into something that's not quite. >>But if you look at the network, it's you have to have a lot of device is very close to each other. I in my area that all these the holdings holding these hearings about radiation, everything else like that, which is never, never really a problem unless you're underneath. >>Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of fun, you know, fear, uncertainty around five G. >>Yeah, and I'm just the practical thing. You gotta have all of these lots of these very close in the The exposure to having a gap of some sort is pretty high. >>Yeah, I think it's an issue of frequencies as well. Right now, we're seeing very high frequency five deployed for those dense urban suburban areas. We're going to Seymour Spectrum rolled out next year. The FCC is putting out new auction so you'll see lower bit rate five g rolled out for suburban and rural areas. So it's a It's a work in progress, but the fact that we have first devices first silicon for software first networks. It's kind of a big inflection >>point, but some bumps. I'm inferring this ATT the back end. It could be a lot of machine to machine communications, so that's kind of sets up this whole coyote and an edge discussion. And of course, that means more data. What can you tell us about how that's going to affect really the amount of data and how we use that data? >>The data explosion is extraordinary. I mean, we experience this as early adopters here at the table every day, and so no one's ever said, you know, my network is fast enough is good enough, secure enough. There's always that insatiable appetite now, given the connected world in which we live. And so it's not just the network speed it's the input output of the device. I mean, we have Leighton see that frankly, from these networks operates at the speed of the human brain, you know, in in milliseconds, in terms of input output on the network. And so that's really gonna change the user experience to when the way you do gaming or collaboration or video conferencing video calls and all these service is we use today will be much more tuned to how we live and work. >>So dial upto high speed Internet obvious Are you want? I'll update you say you go back. I'm also I know remember this stuff But that was a significant change. Obvious step change, really a step function. Exactly. But subsequent to that it was I could doom. Or but it was just so much more data and acts were flowing through the network that it really didn't change the experience a little bit. Maybe, actually, you know, be careful. I watched the Patriots game on the plane on the NFL app on the way out here, which could probably have done a year or two ago, but so that was that's goodness. But generally speaking, the experience is substantially similar. Will you said a 10 X before? Will the user actually see a difference like that kind of dial up to high speed step function? Or is it going to be sort of a slow roll? >>I think the user will see a big a big improvement because of the efficiencies of the network and the way in which data is kind of throttled and limited. Today, with three and four for G networks, I think more interestingly, is how businesses and enterprises and sm bees will consume. Five g. I mean, there are a lot of antiquated networks out there, whether it's legacy wired Network, D S. L. Whether it's, you know, crappy WiFi that we all experience in hotel rooms, five g has the opportunity to come in and really displace all of that legacy crap that that's in our networks and give users in those enterprises hotels, venues, a brand new experience. And when's the last time you had a bad hotel? WiFi, for the idea of, of getting rid of a legacy network and delivering those high speed service is from a public network. It's her Private networking is a really exciting opportunity for the carriers and, really, for the B two B enterprise. >>Well, the technology suppliers are pumped about their pumped and their >>look at their profitability, their revenue, their sales. Everything's up. >>Well, the thing is that that is, the carriers, like you say they have no choice but to remain competitive. They have to consume. They have to spend more >>on what a great time in the mobile industry. I mean to be a consumer of devices and service is, I mean, the consumers that businesses are winning in this march. >>So tell us about Mobile World Congress. What was the vibe? It was >>very buzzy. I mean, there were lots of Rhea World applications on display, whether wearable devices for health care and hospital T applications. There were examples of remote controlled autonomous shipping and autonomous trucking monitored, supervised with five G. There were examples of vehicle to vehicle communications for accident, safety purposes being deployed in the next generation of cars baked in, and so five. He's gotten very practical. Now it's like, Okay, we've built this network, we have silicon, we have software we have storage memory out of we deploy it so is very focused on deployment usage and an application. >>If you take that one of automotive, for example, if you're a god, health and life on your If you If you can't guarantee that you've got connectivity toe, what's the value wouldn't do? For example, wouldn't you prefer vehicle to vehicle direct communication, as opposed to going outside to some much faster? >>Exactly. Exactly. And there's a new technology called vehicle Be two extra people vehicle standards that are being baked so that that's not funny. It's based on the five of the family of standards, and so one of the technologies within the five G family is vehicle to vehicle. Qualcomm's doing some amazing work there. And once the automobile manufacturers baked that technology into cars, the car manufacturers can then build in vehicle avoidance, vehicle collision technology and so forth. >>So I'm worried that was some talk about a I right? I mean, lots of talk that mobile world Congress, you're gonna hear a lot about here. What about the ecosystem that's emerging to support five G? There's gotta be a whole value chain specialized chips. I mean, obviously, micron, you know? Yeah, you know, the >>whole supply chain has to come together and Micron powering all of these devices with memory and storage to the application developers to the O E ems to the network providers. And so that ecosystem is getting really baked, fully baked and and integrated. And that was on display at MWC, too. So all these things are coming together, and I think it's pretty exciting. As a long time skeptic like yourself. I saw some real world. >>I say, I'm excited about it. I just I'm just not holding my breath. Don't >>hold your breath. Not >>recommended weight. That's great, Evan. Thanks very much for coming in. Thanks so much. Appreciate your insights. Thanks so much. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. But it will be back from Micron Insight 2019 from San Francisco. You're watching the Cube?

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Micron Insight 2019. (upbeat music) Brought to you by Micron. >> Hi, everybody, welcome to Pier 27 in San Francisco. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host, David Floyer. And you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our coverage of Micron Insight 2019, #microninsight. David, I love this show because, well, of course we're going to talk about Micron and memories and DRAMs and NANDs and all that techy stuff. We're also going to sort of set the tone on this day. It's a really thought leadership day and we talk a lot about AI and Edge and the big mega trends and superpowers, the cloud, mobile, that are really affecting demand and it all starts with data. So, Micron is a company that we're going to talk about and talk about in detail. But what are you seeing, David, as the big trends that are driving demand for bits? >> For bits. Well, let's start with the Edge that you were talking about. The Edge is growing and it's going to grow very, very strongly indeed. It's going to grow with smaller processes, it's the ARM processors at the Edge doing inference processing, capturing the data, and wanting to do that capturing of the data and the processing of that data as close to the origin of that data as possible. So memory and all of the, the NAND is moving out to the Edge itself. And it's going to be lots of smaller processes as opposed to the lots of big processes. >> Let me ask you a question. We've been following these markets for many, many years and, of course, when we started in the business it was all mainframe, and that was really what drove the consumption of data, and then the PC changed that. >> David: Took over, yep. >> And then that, you used to count markets. We used to do that all the time, and there was much more data going to the laptops and desktops, the Internet began to change that and of course, cloud sort of re-centralized a lot of the spending, and a lot of the buying power. Do you see, is it a pendulum swing again, is it that dramatic? Or do you see it as different? >> Like all big trends, the center still remains. So, the center now is cloud. Still mainframes is part of that cloud. That has to remain, and that is just much more economical for large-scale processing. That's the most economical. However, also the economics of it is that moving data is very expensive. It's very expensive in terms of the effort and it also, when you move data, you lose context. So, if you want the best context, and if you want to do things in real time, you want to process that data in real time as close to where it was produced as possible. So, yes, there will be a very big swing in the amount of processing and the amount of important processing that happens at the Edge. >> So, from the standpoint of things like NAND and flash, Steve Jobs changed everything when they decided to put flash inside of the iPhone. >> Actually not the iPhone. >> In the iPod, actually. >> iPod, yes. >> That drove massive massive, that was the beginning, the dam breaking, and what happened is that volumes went through the roof, cost went down, and that's really when you first predicted way back in the early part of this decade that NAND and flash would affect spinning disc, and it clearly has. Pricing maybe hasn't come down as fast as we thought because of supply constraints. But, nonetheless, it's happening. And now the prices are coming down more. You've seen somewhat of an oversupply in NAND. Prices have come down pretty substantially. And there's elasticity. Ever since we've been following this market, you've seen when prices drop, people buy more. At the same time, you saw like Pure Storage last quarter said, well, the prices dropped faster than we thought, it actually hurt our revenue. Because it just happened so fast in the middle of the quarter, that it hurt pricing overall for the subsystems, but nonetheless, that's the trend that we see happening. It feels like there's a new wave or a new step function of consumption going on with regard to flash. What are you seeing? >> Yes, flash was always about performance before, and there were two constraints to flash, in terms of its impact on the whole industry. The first was that the protocols that were used in flash were the old fashioned protocols that were used for HDD. Now, those have improved enormously with NVMe, et cetera, and those have got much, much better. So, that increases the demand for that flash. The usefulness of flash is now much better. And the second is, in terms of, that's high performance, there's high-capacity flash, and now flash is growing in two dimensions. It's growing in the number of layers, but it's growing from SLC to MLC to TLC to QLC in terms of the number of bits that it can pack into it. >> So, those all have cost implications on the cost per bit, obviously? >> Sure. Both of those are reducing the cost per bit, and making it available for different markets. So the capacity market, now as the prices come down, mean that it's going to take a bigger bite into the HDDs. In data center, it's going to become the norm just to have flash only. >> Micron's a little bit late to NVMe, but they're now hopping on board. Actually, you've made the comment to me in previous discussions, that they've actually timed things pretty well. >> Yeah. >> You kind of didn't want to over-rotate to NVMe. I know Pure was first, but Pure's a relatively small part of the marketplace. It seems like now everybody's going to NVMe. And basically what this does, as you pointed out, it eliminates a lot of the sort of older, slow, over head chatty protocols, and now it's like a bat phone right to the data. What are you seeing in terms of NVMe adoption? Is it now mainstream? >> Yes, we're predicting that in 2019 50% of the drives will be NVMe drives. That's a very rapid change. >> Let's up-level a little bit. We're talking about all of this geeky stuff down here, but what I'm interested in is why we need this. And the obvious question is there's so much more data now but it's also, AI. We talk a lot about the new innovation sandwich of being data plus AI plus cloud, combine those things together and that's really what's driving innovation. How real is AI? I presume we need all this stuff to be able to support these data-driven workloads, but how real is AI? It feels like it's pretty substantive. When we go to a lot of these shows, you hear about digital transformation and all these buzzwords and the Edge and IOT. 'Course, AI's one of the big buzzwords, but it does really actually feel like a superpower to invoke one of Pat Gelsinger's words. >> Yeah, it is. And AI could only operate if there was all that data available, so it's the availability of that data, because the algorithms and AI go back a long way. There's nothing new in that. But AI has now the availability of processing that data, large amounts of data, which makes it much more powerful. And now you're getting AI in things like a cellphone, the amount of AI that goes into recognizing your face is enormous. And it's now practical, everyday things are being done in AI, and it's going from being a niche to being just everyday use. And it's impact longterm is profound. It'll do all the jobs that humans do, many of the jobs that humans do, much more efficiently. Driving a car. It'll be better at driving a car than human beings are. >> Yeah, you see AI everywhere, you're right. Ad serving still stinks, but it's getting better. Fraud detection's getting much, much better. Email is now finishing my sentences for me. Right, you've noticed that in the last year or so. Basically say, oh, I like that choice, boom, I'll take it. And so as much as we hate autocorrect... And so those are some small examples, but what the industry likes to talk about is how it's changing lives, what it's going to do for healthcare, autonomous vehicles. Those are some of the big-picture items. >> David: Really big things. >> Which really haven't kicked in yet, just in terms of, or have they? In terms of consuming demand, for things like DRAM and NAND? >> It's relatively small at the moment but it has the potential to be very large, obviously. >> Dave: Go ahead, finish your thought. >> Because in the next 10 years we're going to see automated cars, it's going to be in pieces. You're going to have the trucks going first, and then other cars later. >> I know you're fairly sanguine and optimistic about autonomous vehicles, I know there are a lot of skeptics out there that talk about, we don't have enough data and we'll see, but we'll talk more about that. But I want to talk about Micron a little bit. Micron's a company, last year they were a $30 billion company, they got $23 billion in revenue this year so dramatic drop in revenues. And that was really due to the change in the supply/demand dynamic. Now, historically, when these things happen the stocks of these companies would just, you could predict it, you'd say, okay, time to sell, 'cause here comes the over-supply. And then when they hit the bottom, time to buy. Micron's done an amazing job of sort of steadying that. Managing its demand and supply balance. Also, obviously doing share buybacks that help the stock price, but the stock price has held up pretty well. So Micron's now a $23 billion company, last year they threw off $17 billion in free cash flow, this year, 13 billion. But still, well over 50% of their revenue's going back to free cash flow, which is quite large. Their market cap's 51 billion, so they're trading at a 2.2X revenue multiple, which is very strong. And they've got a 30% gross margin, right? The PC business, think about that. The DRAM, this is a good business, right? That's a nice business, because they don't have a giant direct sales force, so they don't have that cost, it's all through OEM. It's a fairly efficient business, and they've managed it pretty well. Your thoughts on Micron as a company. >> Yes, they have. They've managed the timing of every new release very well indeed. If you go too early, you over-rotate, then you are struggling to get that out. The costs are higher, and the people who are selling the previous generation are going to do better. But they've always timed it perfectly. >> Yeah, now they're facing some challenges. I talked about the supply/demand imbalance, but they're managing that. China, the tariffs hurt them. Huawei, was a big customer. They can't sell the Huawei anymore. China coming after companies like Micron, really going after consumer flash, building fab capacity to begin with, and then eventually China is going to aim at the higher value enterprise. What are you seeing there? >> I agree with you. They've had to rotate because of this problem with the tariffs that have been put on China. So, what's the reaction? They're going to have to invest. And that, long term, is good news for consumers and good news for everybody else, but it's going to be bad news for other people in the business. >> So, a bunch of announcements today. We can't talk about it, 'cause they're not public yet, but you're going to see some SSD stuff coming out. Maybe some acquisitions announced, you might see some other things around 3D XPoint, which is something that we really haven't talked much about but we will, I know your thoughts on that are it's still kind of niche. Remember the HP Memristor, right? Which is, nobody talks about that anymore. But now Micron's in a different situation. They'll figure out, okay, where that fits, but it's still a niche in your view because it doesn't have the volume. But we're going to be talking about that stuff. But, again, up-leveling the conversation to some of those big mega trends, those superpower drivers, data, AI, IOT, and the Edge, and some of the things that are really driving change, in not only industry but also our lives. So, David, appreciate the insight. David and I will be here all day today. You're watching theCUBE from Micron Insight from San Francisco. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (upbeat music)

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering micron insight 2018 brought to you by micron welcome back to the San Francisco Bay everybody we saw the Sun rise in the bay this morning of an hour so we're gonna see the Sun set this gorgeous setting here at Pier 27 Nob Hills up there the Golden Gate Bridge over there and of course we have this gorgeous view of the bay you're watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage we're covering micron insight 2018 ai accelerating intelligence a lot of talk on on on memory and storage but a lot more talk around the future of AI so we got a great discussion here on the auto business and how AI is powering that business Jeff Bader is here is the corporate vice president and general manager of the embedded business unit at micron good to see you again Jeff thanks for coming on and Simon and rigor is the vice president BMW and he's also joined by Vijay Nadkarni who was the global head of AI and augmented reality at Visteon which is a supplier to Automobile Manufacturers gentlemen welcome to the cube thanks so much for coming on thank you so you guys had a panel earlier today which was pretty extensive and just a lot of talk about AI how AI will be a platform for interacting with the vehicle the consumer the driver interacting with the vehicle also talked a lot about autonomous vehicles but Simon watch you kick it off your role at BMW let's let's just start there it will do the same for Vijay and then get into it research portion that we do globally in which is represented here in North America and so obviously we're working on autonomous vehicles as well as integrating assistance into the car and basically what we're trying to do is to get use AI as much as possible in all of the behavioral parts of the vehicle that uses have an expectations towards being more personalized and having a personalized experience whereas we have a solid portion of the vehicle is going to be as a deterministic anesthetic as we have it before like all of the safety aspects for example and that is what we're working on here right now Vijay Visteon is a supplier to BMW and other auto manufacturers yes we are a tier 1 supplier so we basically don't make cars but we supply auto manufacturers of which BMW is one and my role is essentially AI technology adversity on and also augmented reality so in AI there are basically two segments that we cater to and one of them is that almost driving which is fully our biggest segment and the second one is infotainment and in that the whole idea is to give the driver a better experience in the car by way of recommendations or productivity improvements and such so that is so my team basically develops the technology and then we centrally integrate that into our products so so not necessarily self-driving it's really more about the experience inside the vehicle that is the and then on the autonomous driving side we of course very much are involved with the autonomous driving technology which is tested with detecting objects are also making the proper maneuvers for the Waker and we're definitely going to talk about that now Jeff you sell to the embedded industry of fooding automobile manufacturers we hear that cars have I forget the number of microprocessors but there's also a lot of memory and storage associate yeah I mean if you follow the chain you have our simon representing the OEMs Vijay represented the Tier one suppliers were supplier to those Tier one suppliers in essence right so so we're providing memory and storage that then goes in to the car in as you said across all of the different sort of control and engine drone and computing units within the car in particular into that infotainment application and increasingly into the a TAS or advanced driver assistance systems that are leading toward autonomous driving so there's a lot of AI or some AI anyway in vehicles today right presumably yeah affected David who did a wonderful job on the panel he was outstanding but he kind of got caught up in having multiple systems like a like an apple carplay your own system I actually have a bit about kind of a BMW have a mini because I'm afraid it's gonna be self-driving cars and I just want to drive a drive on car for this take it away from me though but but you push a button if you want to talk to a Syrian yeah push another button if you want to talk to the mini I mean it's it's gonna use it for different use cases right exactly may I is also about adaption and is also about integrating so AI is is is coming with you with the devices that you have with you anyway right so your might be an Alexa user rather than a Google assistant user and you would have that expectation to be able to ask to chat with your Alexa in your car as well that's why we have them in the vehicle also we have an own voice assistant that we recently launched in Paris Motorshow which augments the experience that you have with your own assistants because it factors in all of the things you can do with the car so you can say there is a solid portion of AI already in the vehicle it's mainly visible in the infotainment section right and of course I remember the first time I'm sure you guys experienced to that the the car braked on my behalf and then kind of freaked me out but then I kind of liked it too and that's another form of machine intelligence well that out well that counts for you that had not that has not necessarily been done by AI because in in in let's say self-driving there is a portion of pretty deterministic rule based behavior and exactly that one like hitting an object at parking you don't need AI to determine to hit the right there is no portion or of AI necessary in order to improve that behavior whereas predicting the best driving strategy for your 20-mile ride on the highway this is where AI is really beneficial in fact I was at a conference last week in Orlando it's the Splunk show and it was a speaker from BMW talking about what you're doing in that regard yeah it's all about the data right learning about it and and in turning data into insights into better behavior yes into better expected behavior from whatever the customer wants so Vijay you were saying before that you actually provide technology for autonomous vehicles all right I got a question for you could it autonomous - could today's state of autonomous vehicles pass a driver's test no no would you let it take one no it depends I mean there are certain companies like way mo for example that do a lot but I still don't think way mo can take a proper driver's test as of today but it is of course trying to get there but what we are essentially doing is taking baby steps first and I think you may be aware of the SAE levels so level 1 level 2 level 3 level 4 SF and a 5 so we and most of the companies in the industry right now are really focusing more on the level 2 through level 4 and a few companies like Google or WAV or other and uber and such are focusing on the level 5 we actually believe that the level 2 through 4 is the market would be ready for that essentially in the shorter term whereas the level 5 will take a little while to get that so everybody Christmas and everyone we're gonna have autonomous because I'm not gonna ask you that question because there's such a spectrum of self-driving but I want to ask you the question differently and I ask each of you when do you think that driving your own car will become the exception rather than than the rule well I'd rather prefer actually to rephrase the question maybe to where not when because we're on a highway setting this question can be answered precisely in roughly two to three years the the functionality will kick in and then it's going to be the renewal of the vehicles so if you answer if you if you ask where then there is an answer within the next five years definitely if we talk about an urban downtown scenario the question when is hard to answer yeah well so my question is more of a social question it is a technology question because I'm not giving up my stick shift high example getting my 17 year old to get his permit was like kicking a bird out of the nest I did drive his permanent driver on staff basically with me right so why but I mean when I was a kid that was freedom 16 years old you racing out and there is a large generational group growing up right now that doesn't necessarily see it as a necessity right so not driving your own car I think car share services right share who bore the so and so forth are absolutely going to solve a large portion of the technology of the transportation challenge for a large portion of the population I think but I agree with the the earlier answers of it's gonna be where you're not driving as opposed to necessarily win and I think we heard today of course the you know talking about I think the number is 40,000 fatalities on the roadways in the u.s. in the u.s. yeah everybody talks about how autonomous vehicles are going to help attack that problem um but it strikes me talk about autonomous cars it why don't we have autonomous carts like in a hospital or even autonomous robots that aren't relying on lines or stripes or beacons you one would think that that would come before in our autonomous vehicle am I missing something are there are there there there systems out there that that I just haven't seen well I don't know if you've ever seen videos of Amazon distribution centers yeah but they're there they're going to school on lines and beacons and they are they're not really autonomous yeah that's fair that's fair yeah so will we see autonomous carts before we see autonomous cars I think it's a question what problem that solves necessarily yeah it's just as easy for them to know where something is yeah you think about microns fabs every one of our fabs is is completely automated as a material handling system that runs up and down around the ceilings handling all the wafers and all the cartridges the wafers moving it from one tool to the next tool to the next tool there's not people anymore carrying that around or even robots on the floor right but it's a guided track system that only can go to certain you know certain places well the last speaker today ii was talking about it I remember when robots couldn't climb stairs and now they can do backflips and you know you think about the list of things that humans can do that computers can't do it let's get smaller and smaller every year so it's kind of scary to think about one hand is that does the does the concept of Byzantine fault-tolerance you guys familiar with that does that does that come into play here you guys know what that's about I don't know what it is exactly so that's a problem and I first read about it with it's the Byzantine general problem if you have nine generals for one Oh attack for one retreat and the ninth sends a message to half to retreat or not and then you don't have the full force of the attack so the concept is if you're in a self-driving boat within the vehicle and within the ecosystem around the city then you're collectively solving the problem so there these are challenging math that need to be worked out and and I'm not saying I'm a skeptic but I just wanted more I read about it the more hurdles we have there's some isolated examples of where AI I think fits really well and is gonna solve problems today but this singularity of vehicle seems to be we have a highly regulated environment obviously public transportation or public roads right are a highly regulated environment so it's like it's different than curating playlists or whatever right this is not so much regulated traffic and legislation isn't there yet so especially and it's it's designed for humans right traffic cars roads are designed for human to use them and so the adoption to they the design of any legislation any public infrastructure would be completely different if we didn't drive as humans but we have it we have machines drive them so why are robots and carts not coming because the infrastructure really is designed for humans and so I think that's what's going to be the ultimate slow down is how fast we as a society that comes up with legislation with acceptance of behavioral aspects that are driven by AI on how fast we adopt it technically I think it can happen faster than yeah yeah it's not a technology problem as much as it is the public policy insurance companies think about one of the eventually you can think of from from let's say even level four capable car on a highway is platooning yeah right instead of having X number of car lengths to the turn fryer you just stack them up and they're all going on in a row that sounds great until Joe Blow with their 20 year old Honda you know starts to pull into that Lane right so you either say this Lane is not allowed for that or you create special infrastructure essentially that isn't designed for humans there is more designed specifically for the for the machine driven car right how big is this market it's it feels like it's enormous I don't know how do you look at the tan we can talk to the memory I can talk the memory storage part of it right but today memory and storage all of memory storage for automotive is about a two and a half billion dollar market that is gonna triple in the next three years and probably beyond that my visibility is not so good maybe yours is better for sure but it then really driven by adoption rate and how fast that starts to penetrate through the car of OAM lines and across the different car in vijay your firm is when were you formed how long you've been around or vistas be around basically since around 2001 okay we were part of relatively old spun out whiskey on that at work right okay so so alright so that's been around forever yeah for this Greenfield for you for your your group right where's the aw this is transitional right so is it is it is it you try not to get disrupted or you trying to be the disrupter or is it just all sort of incremental as a 101 year old company obviously people think about you as being ripe for disruption and I think we do quite well in terms of renewing ourselves coming from aeroplane business to a motorcycle business to garbage and so I think the answer is are we fast enough I'll be fast enough in adoption and on the other hand it's fair to say that BMW with all of its brands is part of a premium thing and so it's not into the mass transportation so everything that's going to be eaten up by something like multi occupancy vehicle mass transportation in a smaller effort right this is probably not going to hurt the premium brand so much as a typical econo type of boxy car exciting time so thanks so much for coming on the cube you got a run appreciate thank you so much okay thanks for watching everybody we are out from San Francisco you've watched the cube micron inside 2018 check out Silicon angle comm for all the published research the cube dotnet as well you'll find these videos will keep on calm for all the research thanks for watching everybody we'll see you next time you

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering Micron Insight 2018. It's just wrapping up behind us. It's a day long of thought-leading content around AI, AI for good, how it's affecting the human condition and healthcare and the future of AI. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Peter Burris and that's the Golden Gate Bridge over there. You used to live right up that hill over there. >> I did. >> Dee Mooney is here. >> Until they kicked me out. >> Dee Mooney is here. She's the Executive Director of the Micron Foundation. Dee, thanks so much for taking time out of your schedule and coming on theCUBE. >> You bet, I'm very pleased to be here with you today. >> So, you guys had some hard news today. We heard about the 100 million dollar fund that you're launching, but you also had some news around the Foundation. >> That's right. >> The grant, you announced two winners of the grant. Tell us about that. >> That's right. So, it was a great opportunity for Micron to showcase its goodness and what a great platform for us to be able to launch the Advancing Curiosity grant. It is all around really focusing on that, on advancing curiosity, in the hopes that we can think about how might AI help for good, whether that's in business and health or life, and it's really a great platform for us to be able to be a part of today. >> So, what are the specifics? It was a million dollar grant? >> So, it was a million dollar fund and today we announced our first recipients. It was to the Berkeley College of Engineering, specifically their BAIR, which is Berkeley A, Artificial Intelligence Research lab, then also Stanford PHIND lab, which is the Precision, Health and Integrated Diagnostics lab. And then also a non-profit called AI For All, and really their focus is to get the next generation excited about AI and really help the underrepresented groups be exposed to the field. >> So with AI For All, so underrepresented groups as in the diversity culture-- >> Females, underrepresented groups that might not actually get the exposure to this type of math and science in schools and so they do summer camps and we are helping to send students there next summer. >> How do you decide, what are the criteria around which you decide who gets the grants, and take us through that process. >> Today, because we are all about goodness and trying to enhance and improve our communities, this was all around how can AI do some good. So, we are taking a look at what problems can be solved utilizing AI. The second thing we're taking a look at is the type of technology. We want students and our researchers to take a good look at how the technology can work. Then also, what groups are being represented. We want a very diverse group that bring different perspectives and we really think that's our true ability to innovate. >> Well, there's some real research that suggests a more diverse organization solves problems differently, gets to more creativity and actually has business outcomes. That may not be the objective here, but certainly it's a message for organizations worldwide. >> We certainly think so. The more people that are being involved in a conversation, we think the richer the ideas that come out of it. One more thing that we are taking a look at in this grant is we'd like the recipients to think about the data collection, the privacy issues, the ethical issues that go along with collecting such massive amounts of data, so that's also something that we want people to consider when they're applying. >> One of the challenges in any ethical framework is that the individuals that get to write the ethical framework or test the ethical framework, the ethics always works for them. One of the big issues that you just raised is that there is research that shows that if you put a certain class of people and make them responsible for training the AI system, that their biases will absolutely dominate the AI system. So these issues of diversity are really important, not just from a how does it work for them, but also from a very starting point of what should go into the definition of the problem, the approach and solution, how you train it. Are you going the full scope or are you looking at just segments of that problem? >> We'll take a look at, we hope to solve the problems eventually, but right now, just to start with, it's the first announcement of the fund. It's a million dollars, like we mentioned. The first three recipients were announced today. The other recipients that come along, we're really excited to see what comes out of that because maybe there will be some very unique approaches to solving problems utilizing AI. >> What other areas might you look at? How do you determine, curiosity and AI, how'd you come up with that and how do you determine the topics in the areas that you go after? >> The Micron Foundation's mission is to enhance our lives through our people and our philanthropy and we focus on stem and also basic human needs. So, when Micron is engaged in large business endeavors like today, talking about AI, it was the perfect opportunity for us to bring our goodness and focus on AI and the problems that can be solved utilizing it. >> Pretty good day today, I thought. >> Oh, yeah. >> I have to say, I've followed Micron for awhile and you guys can get pretty down and dirty on the technical side, but it was an up-level conversation today. The last speaker in particular really made us think a little bit, talking about are we going to get people to refer-- >> Max Tegmark, right? >> Was that Max Tegmark? Yeah. >> I think that's the name. I didn't catch his name, I popped in late. But he was talking about artificial general intelligence >> I know. >> Reaching, I guess a singularity and then, what struck me is he had a panel of AI researchers, all male, by the way, I think >> Yes. >> I noticed that. >> Yes, we did too. >> The last one, which was Elon Musk, who of course we all know, thinks that there's going to be artificial general intelligence or super intelligence, and he asked every single panel member, will we achieve that, and they all unanimously said yes. So, either they're all dead wrong or the world is going to be a scary place in 20, 30, 50 years. >> Right, right. What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, it was certainly thought-provoking to think about all the good things that AI can do, but also maybe the other side and I'm actually glad that we concluded with that, because that is an element of our fund. We want the people that apply to it or that we'll work with to think about those other sides. If these certain problems are solved, is there a down side as well, so that is definitely where we want that diverse thinking to come in, so we can approach the problems in a good way that helps us all. >> Limited time left, let's talk a little bit about women in tech. In California, Jerry Brown just signed a law into effect that, I believe it's any public company, has to have a woman >> On the Board? >> on the Board. What do you think about that? >> Well, personally, I think that's fantastic. >> Well, you're biased. (laughs) >> I might be a little biased. I guess it's a little unfortunate we now have to have laws for this because maybe there's not enough, I'm not exactly sure, 6but I think it's a step in the right direction. That really aligns well with what we try to do, bring diversity into the workplace, diversity into the conversation, so I think it's a good step in the right direction. >> You know, let's face it, this industry had a lack, really, of women leaders. We lost Meg Whitman in a huge Fortune 50 company, in terms of a woman leader, replaced by Antonio Neri, great guy, know him well, but that was one, if you're counting, one down. Ginni Rometty, obviously, huge presence in the industry. I want to ask you, what do you think about, I don't want to use the word quotas, I hate to use it, but if you don't have quotas, what's the answer? >> I don't know about quotas either. We do know that we help, our Foundation grants span the pipeline from young students all the way up through college and we see this pipeline. It starts leaking along the way. Fifth grade, we start seeing girls fall out. Eighth grade is another big-- >> In the U.S. >> In the U.S. >> Not so much in other countries, which is pretty fascinating. >> We are a global foundation and when we talk with our other partners, they're also interested in having stem outreach into their schools because they want to bring in the critical thinking and problem-solving skills, so, I used to think it was quite just a U.S. problem, but now being exposed to other cultures and countries, definitely they have a different approach, but I think it's a problem that we all strive to overcome. >> Well, it's pretty good research that shows that governance that includes women is generally more successful. It reaches better decisions, it reaches decisions that lead to, in the case of Boards, greater profitability, more success, so if you can't convince people with data, you have to convince them with law. At the end of the day, it would be nice if people recognized that a diverse approach to governance usually ends up with a better result but if you can't, you got to hit 'em over the head. >> I guess so, I guess so. >> Well, obviously, with the Kavanaugh confirmation, there's been a lot of talk about this lately. There's been some pretty interesting stuff. I've got two daughters, you have a daughter. Some pretty interesting stuff in our family chat that's been floating around. I saw, I think it was yesterday, my wife sent me a little ditty by a young woman who was singing a song about how tough it is for men, sort of tongue-in-cheek and singing things like, I can't open the door in my pajamas, I can't walk down the street on my phone at night, I can't leave my drink unattended, so tough for men, so tough for men, so on the one hand, you have the Me Too movement, you have a lot more, since Satya Nadella put his foot in his mouth at the Grace Opera event, I don't know if you saw that, he said-- >> I didn't. >> He said, a couple years ago >> He's the CEO of Microsoft. >> Said a couple years ago, a woman in the audience, Grace Opera, big conference for women, asked, "If we're underpaid, should we say anything?" and he said, no, that's bad kharma, you should wait and be patient, and then of course, he got a lot of you know what for that. >> That probably didn't work for them. And then, he apologized for it, he did the right thing. He said, you know what, I'm way off base and then he took proactive action. But, since then, you feel like there's been certainly much more attention paid to it, the Google debacle of last summer with the employee that wrote that Jerry Maguire tome. >> Right, right. >> Now the Me Too movement, then you see the reaction of women from the Kavanaugh appointment. Do you feel like we've made a lot of progress, but then you go, well, hmm, maybe we haven't. >> It sometimes feels like that. It sometimes feels like that. In my career, over 20 years, I have had a very positive experience working with men, women alike and have been very supported and I hope that we can continue to have the conversations and raise awareness, that everyone can feel good in their workplace, walking down the street and, like you mentioned, I think that it's very important that we all have a voice and all of us bring a different, unique perspective to the table. >> So do you feel that it's two steps forward, Dee, and maybe one step back every now and then, or are we making constant progress? >> It kind of feels like that right now. I'm not sure exactly why, but it seems like we're talking a lot about it more now and maybe just with a lot more attention on it, that's why it's seeming like we're taking a step back, but I think progress has been made and we have to continue to improve that. >> Yeah, I think if you strip out the politics of the Kavanaugh situation and then focus on the impact on women, I think you take a different perspective. I think that's a discussion that's worth having. On theCUBE last week, I interviewed somebody, she called herself, "I'm a Fixer," and I said, "You know, here's some adjectives I think of in a fixer, is a good listener, somebody who's a leader, somebody who's assertive, somebody who takes action quickly. Were those the adjectives that were described about you throughout your career, and the answer was, not always. Sometimes it was aggressive or right? >> True, true. >> That whole thing, when a woman takes swift action and is a leader, sometimes she's called derogatory names. When a man does it, he's seen as a great leader. So there's still that bias that you see out there, so two steps forward, one step back maybe. Well Dee, last thoughts on today and your mission. >> Well, we really hope to encourage the next generation to pursue math and science degrees, whether they are female or male or however they identify, and we want them to do great and hopefully have a great career in technology. >> I'm glad you mentioned that, 'cause it's not just about women, it's about people of color and however you identify. So, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. >> You bet, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from Micron Insight 2018 from San Francisco. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(lively music) >> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco Bay everybody, we're here covering Micron Insight 2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my cohost David Floyer. Sanjay Mehrotra is here, he's the president and CEO of Micron. Sanjay, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be on the show. >> So quite an event here! First of all beautiful venue. >> Lovely venue. >> Got the Golden Gate that way, we got Nob Hill over there. So tell us about this event. It's not just about hardcore tech and memory. You guys are talking about AI for good, healthcare, changing the world. What's behind that? >> Yeah, our focus is on AI technologies and how AI is really changing the world. In terms of life, in terms of business, in terms of health. This is a showcase of how these technologies are in very very early innings, they've just barely begun. And what's happened is that AI algorithms have been around for a long time but now the compute capability and the memory and storage capability have advanced to the levels that you can really mine through a lot of data real-time, derive lot of insights and translate those insights into intelligence. And Micron plays a pivotal role here because our memory, our storage is where all this data resides, where all this data is processed. So we are very excited to bring together many industry figures, industry luminaries, park leaders, researchers, engineers all here today to engage in a dialogue on where technology is going, where AI is going, how it's shaping the world. And for the realization that hardware is absolutely central to this trend. And memory and storage is key. And we are very excited about what it means for the future. >> So a lot of thought leaders here today. Well first of all you guys have some hard news, which is relevant to what we're talking about. Talk about the hundred million dollar fund and how you've deployed it even just today you've made some sub-announcements. >> So, one of the things we announced today is we are launching a hundred million dollar fund to support, to fund start-ups in AI. Because we really think AI is going to transform the world. We want to be in the front row. With not only the large existing players that are driving this change but also the start-ups that will drive innovation. Having the front row seat with those start-ups, through our investment fund, will really help us accelerate intelligence, accelerate time to market of various AI applications. So a hundred million dollar fund is targeted toward supporting start-ups that are developing AI technologies. And what I'm really excited to talk about here is that 20% of that fund will go to start-ups that have leadership that is represented by women or under-represented groups. Under-represented--those groups that are under-represented in tech today. This demonstrates Micron's commitment to diversity and inclusion in the technologies phase. >> Well that's, well first of all congratulations on that we're big supporters >> Absolutely >> Of women and tech and diversity, it's something that we cover on the theCUBE extensively. And now you've announced two grants just today, a half a million dollars each. One with Stanford, one with Berkeley that we heard. We heard Amazon up on stage talking about Alexa AI, Microsoft was onstage we had NVIDIA on theCUBE earlier. So bringing together an ecosystem that involves academia, your partners, your customers, talk about that a little bit. >> So the two grants that you talked about, those are from Micron Foundation that is again supporting advancement of AI and AI research as well as teaching of AI to kids so that we can build the pipeline of strong engineers and technologists of the future. So the two grants that we have announced today are one to Stanford Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center, 200,000 grant to Stanford, pioneers in AI applications to precision management of your health. Very exciting field that will really truly enrich life and prolong life in the future as well as advance detection of diseases. Second $200,000 grant that we are giving is to Berkeley. Artificial Intelligence Research Center, absolutely cutting-edge that will be applicable to many industries and many walks of life. These are intended to support advancement of AI research. In addition to this advanced curiosity grant to these two institutions later today you'll hear there will be announcing a $100,000 grant to AI4ALL. And this is an institution that is encouraging women and under-represented minorities at high school level, 9th grade to 11th grade to pursue STEM careers. So Micron is really promoting study of advanced research and supporting the pipeline. In addition to this of course our focus today is on bringing together industry luminaries just like you mentioned, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, autonomous driving of the future, automotive partners, BMW, Visteon, really to engage in a dialogue of how AI is advancing in these various applications. We just heard great talk from vice president at Amazon, on Alexa devices really really exciting how those devices are truly making your life so easy and so intelligent. We heard from Microsoft Corporate Vice-President of AI research. So you see we really are as leaders in our industry, we are really bringing together industry experts to engage in a thought-provoking and inspiring dialogue on AI so that when we leave here today we leave with insights into what is coming next but even more importantly what do we all need to do to get there faster, and this is all about technology. >> So Sanjay and David too, Micron is one of the few companies that was here when I started in the business and is still around. At the time you were just a component manufacturer doin' memories and wow to watch the diversification of Micron over the years but also recently, I mean it's incredibly well-run company so congratulations on the recent success. At the analyst event in New York City this year, you talked about not only that diversification in your investments and innovation but you talked about the cyclicality of this business the historical cyclicality of this business you've dampened that down a little bit, for a variety of reasons. The capital requirements in this business are enormous, there's been consolidation. So how is that going, talk about sort of the trends in your business both in terms of diversification and your ability to make this business more predictable. >> So Dave you are very right to know that Micron is 40 year old company, we actually just turned 40, very proud of it. Really a company founded on the principles of innovation and tenacity. In fact the company has contributed to the industry to the world over the course of 40 years, 40,000 patents, just imagine that's a thousand patents a year, three patents a day over the course of 40 years. We are really a prolific inventor and we absolutely through our innovations in memory and storage have shaped the world here. As technology advances it really unleashes more applications and this is what has brought about the change in our industry. Today memory is not just in your PC. Of course it is in this PC but it is also in your data center it is going to be in the autonomous records of the future you going to have as much memory as what you had in the server just a few years ago. It's inside your mobile phone Artificial Intelligence, facial recognition is only possible because of the data and memory that you have in there. You have NAND Flash that is in these devices and with technology advancing that's bringing down the price points of NAND Flash really bringing more SSD's into these notebook computers, making these notebook computers lighter, longer battery life, more powerful. And of course Flash drives are also replacing hard test drives in data centers and cloud computing. So many applications, these diverse applications really have brought greater stability in our industry. And of course technology complexity has over time moderated the supply growth. And that's what we mean that the cyclicality of our industry, yes one or two quarters here or there you can have demand and supply mismatches but overall when you look at the demand trends and combine them with the moderating supply trends the long-term trajectory for our industry is very healthy. In fact we just completed a record year. >> Our fiscal year '18 was a record 30 billion dollar year for us with profitability that puts us at the very top of the most companies with 50% operating margin and with 30 billion in revenue we are actually number two largest semiconductor company in the U.S. And a lot of opportunity ahead given the demand drivers in the industry. >> Massive free cash flow, you've said publicly the stock is undervalued which is ya know, I don't know any CEO that says it's overvalued but nonetheless the performance that you've had suggests that you very well might be right. Go ahead David please. >> Yeah I just wanted to ask your opinion on, you are leading in this area now, very very clearly you're growing faster than the industry, you've had a magnificent year and the whole area is grown both the NAND and the DRAM. How are you judging how much to invest in this for the future? What's the balance between giving money back to the stockholders by buying stock back or versus investing in this what seems to me a very very exciting area. >> Do you have an AI algorithm for that? (laughing) >> We are in a great position where we are extremely disciplined about investing in CapEx to reduce cost of production and to deploy new technologies into production. We are very ROI focused in terms of any CapEx investments we make. We of course invest in R and D. I mentioned earlier 40,000 patents over the course of 40 years that only comes in investment in R and D. Investments in R and D are essential because we are today the most comprehensive technology solutions provider in memory and storage in the world. >> Yeah. >> In the world. With our DRAM, our Flash, our 3D crosspoint technologies, as well as future emerging technologies really position us as the only company in the world that have all of these memory and storage technologies under one company roof. So we do invest very thoughtfully and we manage our expenses very carefully but we do invest in R and D and of course we are committed to driving shareholder value as well. And we had announced earlier in the year ten billion dollar share buy back program with at least 50% of a fee cash flow. Every quarter on an annual basis actually, 50% of our fee cash flow on an annual basis going, at least 50% going toward share buy back. So we are managing the business, all aspects of it, excitedly looking forward to the opportunities. At the same time prudently in an otherwise driven fashion, building shareholder value through investments in R and D and manufacturing. >> Well of course the great Warren Buffett, David, says when asked if stock buy backs are a good investment says if your stock's undervalued it's a good investment, so. Obviously you believe that Sanjay, so. >> Absolutely! >> So thanks, thanks very much for coming on the theCUBE it was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> I hope we can have you back again. >> Thank you. >> We could talk to you for a long long time. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright, keep it right there buddy, >> Thank you. >> We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from San Francisco Bay Micron Insight 2018. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music).

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to San Francisco everybody. You're watching theCUBE the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante. He's David Floyer, and we're covering Micro Insight'18. It's all about bringing together artificial intelligence and the memory and storage requirements. We're here on the embarcadero. We've got treasure island that way. We've got the financial district over there. We've got Golden Gate bridge behind us. Tom Eby is here as senior vice president and GM of Micron's booming compute and networking business unit. Good to see you Tom. >> Great to be here. >> And Permal Savla is here. He's the director of deep learning at NVIDIA. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So obviously some of these new emerging work loads require collaboration between folks like Micron and folks like NVIDIA. But Tom why don't you kick it off. What are some of the big trends that you're seeing in some of these alternative work loads that's driving this collaboration? >> Well a lot of what we're talking about here today is the drive of AI and machine learning work loads, and the implications for memory. Certainly there's a host of them, natural language processing, photo and image recognition, applications in medical research, applications in optimizing manufacturing like we're doing in our fabs, and there's many many more. And of course what's exciting for us is that to support those in an optimized way really does require the mating of the optimal processing architecture, things like GPUs. With the right high band width with low latency memory and storage solutions. That's what leads to great partner ships between partnerships like Micron and NVIDIA. >> David was explaining at our open the intensity of the work loads that you guys are serving, and how much more resources that requires to actually deliver the type of performance. Maybe you could talk about some of the things that you're seeing in terms of these emerging work loads. >> Yes, so at NVIDIA, we build systems for X rated computing. AI and deep learning is a very quickly expanding field at this point which needs a lot of CP horse power. What we are seeing is that different applications like you said there's image processing, whether it's video, whether it's natural language processing the amount of data that is there, that is required to do deep learning and AI around it, we break it up into two work flows. One is the training where you actually train the software, and make it intelligent enough to then go and do inference later on. So that you can go and get you results out of it at the end of it. We concentrate on this entire workflow. That's where when we are looking at it from a training perspective, the GPU gives it the processing power. But at the same time all the other components around it perform at the peak. That's where the memory comes in. That's where the storage comes in, and we need to process that data very quickly. >> Yeah, so we know from system's design that you got to have a balanced system or else you're just going to push the bottle necks around. We've learned that over the years, but so it's more than just slapping on a bunch of storage and a bunch of memory. You're doing some other deeper integration, is that correct and what is that integration? >> Yeah, I think the two companies have had a great relationship, just to talk about a couple examples. We essentially co-defined a technology called GEDR 5X, which greatly enhanced the speed of graphics technology. We gently introduced that to the marketplace with NVIDIA about 18 months ago. And then worked with them again very closely on a technology called GDDR six, which is the next generation of even faster technology. We were their launch and ran partner for their recently announced G-force RTX line of cards. It's a very deeply engaged early in the process, define the process, define the standards, jointly develop the solution. Very intimate sharing in the supply chain area. It's a great relationship for us. We're excited about how we can continue to expand and extend that relationship by going forward. >> So obviously there's the two parts of it. You said the learning part of it, and the inference part of the computing. What do you think is the difference between the two? I mean obviously at the end of the day, the inference part is critical. That's got to be the fastest response time. You have to have that in real time. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing to really speed that up, to make that micro seconds as opposed to milliseconds? >> So from an NVIDIA perspective we build the entire end to end tools steps for training and inferencing. We have a set of libraries that we have made it openly available for all of our customers, all our partners, and all users. So that they can go download it, and do the training so they can use the different frameworks and libraries to accelerate the work that they're doing. And then transform it onto the inference spot. We have something called denser RT, which is basically denser real time. That gives the capability to get these answers very quickly. So on our D4 of the tuning, Chip said that we just announced. We can get a very high performance for our image. So any kind of image recognition or image processing that we need to do, we can do that on the systems very quickly. And we can meet, rebuild entire architectures. So it's not just about one piece. It's about the whole end to end architecture of the system. >> So we heard earlier today in the analyst briefing, the press briefing that Micron certainly in the last 40 years has changed. We're seeing a lot more diversity. Usually it'd be all about PCs. Now there's just so many alternative work loads emerging. Clearly NVIDIA is playing there as well with alternative processing capabilities. What do you guys see as some of the more exciting, emerging work loads that are going to require continued collaboration and innovation? >> Yeah, well I think to build a little bit on some of the other comments about the need for real time inference, one of the things in the area of diversity that we've found interesting. The relationship between Micron and NVIDIA in high performance memory really started around their graphics business. But we are seeing in other markets closer to the edge, in automotive, in networking and in other areas where there's a need for that real time performance. Yet there's also a need for a degree of cost effectiveness. Perhaps a little more so than in the data center. That we're seeing technologies like GDR six being applied to a much broader range of applications like automotive, like networking, like Edge AI, to provide the performance to get that real time response but in a form factor and at a cost point that's affordable for the application. >> Anything you'd add to that Permal? >> So I would also add you talked about applications, different applications that are changing right? Today we announced a new set of libraries and tools for the analytic space. That's again a big work load in the enterprise data centers, that we are trying to optimize and accelerate with machine learning. So we announced a whole set of tools which take in these large data sets that are coming in, and applying it in the data centers and using it to get answers very quickly. So that's what NVIDIA is also doing is expanding on these capabilities as we go in. And as these components and as these technologies get better it just gets our answers much more quickly. >> As exacts in the space and you guys both, you're component manufacturers, and so you sell to people who sell to end consumers. How do you get your information in that sort of pull through? Obviously you work with your customers very closely. >> Mm-hm. >> How do you get visibility to their customers? Just going to go to shows, you go do joint sales calls, how does that all work? >> Certainly some of that is in discussions with our customers and their marketing groups about what they're seeing from a customer point of view. But certainly there's other paths. One of the reasons behind the hundred million dollar venture fund that we announced today, is one of the best ways to get that advanced insight, is to be working with some of the most innovative start ups that understand what some of those end users needs might be and are developing some unique technologies. So there's a range. Working with our customers through eventually finding others, but it's important that we understand those needs because the lead time to developing the solutions both memory and processing architectures is quite well. >> Of course everybody wants to work with NVIDIA, you guys have an inundated like come on oh no we're the most. We're tied up now. Of course there's not a lot of choices here when you're talking about the levels of components that you're selling. But what's life like at NVIDIA? I mean they've been knocking down your doors to do partnerships. >> I think we've grown from being just the component to now being a complete system and an architecture. We don't only just build just a chip that the GPU was. We also build full SLCs. We also build the libraries, software, and the tools that are required to make this complete end to end solutions. We also do a lot of open source technologies because we want our customers and our end cast partners to build and take what we have and go beyond what it's capable of. That's where we end value at the end of the day. Yes, it's all of us together. We need to work together to make that much more faster as we go. >> The tuning is incredibly important. This is complicated stuff. It doesn't just work out of the box, right? So you need an ecosystem as well. >> Yes. >> Yes. >> That's what you guys have been out building. Tom, well give your final thoughts. >> Yeah well I guess to build a little bit. Certainly NVIDIA is moving up the stack in terms of the ecosystem, the software, the complete solution and I think Micron does as well. Like you commented, traditionally it was a component play. And increasingly, we're going to be building subsystems in memory and storage that occurs today on the storage side. I think we'll increasingly see that in memory, and with some of the future, very promising technologies like 30 Cross Point. >> Yeah it's the dawn of the days where everybody just gets piece parts and put them all together. They need you you guys to do more integration, and more out of the box like you say subsystems. So guys thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright you're welcome, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back in San Francisco, you're watching theCUBE from Micron Insight 2018, accelerate intelligence. We'll be right back after this short break. (music)

live from San Francisco it's the queue covering micron insight 2018 brought to you by micron welcome to San Francisco everybody this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage my name is Dave Volante I'm here with my co-host David flora this is our special presentation of micron insight 18 hashtag micron insight 18 where the theme is accelerated intelligence the blending together of memory storage and artificial intelligence micron is a 40 year old company there's a dominant player in the DRAM marketplace years and years ago they used to be 1920 manufacturers of DRAM there's really three companies now that dominate that market they own 96% of it micron Samsung and Toshiba I believe right is the third one and and so microns is 30 billion dollar company they've got about a 50 billion just under 50 billion dollar market cap growing like crazy 70% of their business comes from DRAM the balance comes from alternative storage and other memory systems that they built and traditionally David memories have been a very cyclical business micron number two semiconductor manufacturer worldwide behind Intel obviously competing with a lot of overseas players and micron is putting forth the premise that they've begun to be able to dampen the fluctuations the peaks in the valleys in this business why because first of all the capital expense required to participate in this business is enormous that's why somebody companies have been shaken out and secondly the technology transitions are getting much much more difficult and so the premise that micron put forth in May at their financial analyst conference is that the cyclic allottee of this business is starting to moderate we've certainly seen this in some regards in the last several years with component shortages it's been a boon to Microsoft's financials the stock you know up until recently have been been climbing like crazy this is a company that has literally last quarter had seventy percent gross margins in its in business it's not and much much you know and if you look at the SSD business the flash business smaller gross margin maybe 48 50 percent they're gonna start blending those together and reporting on a blended basis I think they don't want Michael Dell you know advertising to Michael Dell that we're getting 70% gross margins on T Ram so they're gonna stop giving that guidance out excessively B to thwart competition but really it's probably examination probably something that's not sustainable but David so we're seeing sort of moderation and supply growth we're seeing a very well-run company this company is growing like crazy let me break down some of the businesses and I want to bring you into the conversation the compute and networking business very strong a grew at 53 percent year-over-year the mobile business up sixty percent last year Mobile's taking tons of of memory of course and and storage the embedded business which is sort of automobiles and and industrial markets is up about 12% and the storage business unit actually is gonna flat to down they expect growth but you know the stores business has been you know a bit of a challenge for them even though you know they're doing very well and they're gaining share they've gone through some transitions that we'll talk about to some of the executives here but but David the theme really is about about bringing artificial intelligence to the world and the intersection between AI and memory and storage obviously you need memory obviously you need storage to make AI happen and you know micron in the value chain at the lowest level is right there making tons of money shipping a lot of product driving a lot of innovation and competing very effectively so your thoughts on micron and right those are this event my car crushing it I mean the the growth in in in their revenues from DRAM with 70 percent year-on-year last four quarters to the four quarters before that was 70 percent desam that's actually was it's 70 percent of their business it was about 50 percent 47 to 50 percent growth so yeah well for the DRAM piece of the business well NAND is about 25 26 percent of the business and and growing you know about 20% a year yeah I think they're on the calling it's tiny but so the the figures the we're using a even better than that so I think as it fundamentally they're crushing it from from a business perspective and they're in as you said in a very good place because as AI takes place as what I call the matrix applications are coming on board that's a virtual reality augmented reality the the modern gaming machines all of these types of compute and then on top of that IOT as well with all the sensors and and the requirements of memory and and compute very very close to the Census themselves all of these different areas are relying on AI to make a difference of lying on that type of workload that matrix workload and some of the figures is very interesting to look at when you're looking at new workloads you need at least around six times as much DRAM and and and more storage as well more and Nan storage as well six times you're talking about the ratio between storage and the if you can take traditional processing you need for a tree you need six times that's interesting figure and and similarly with an and and and the on top of that when you're looking at graphics work all the graphics work that's very very bandwidth intensive and that requires the very latest technology and again premium technology to go into the graphics side of things as well so they are in a the right place at the right time in terms of the speed of which memory is is developing and the opportunities to make a difference so if you think about some of the tail winds and headwinds in their business there's a lot of tailwind I mean they're manufacturing efficiencies they're really started to see a flywheel effect there and they're did micron has made a lot of investment in of technology transitions what's happening is the bit density growth for each new technology transfer transition is starting to moderate presumably Moore's Law story to moderate right is what's really going on there and but they've really done a good job of investing in technology transitions ahead of their competition and so they're getting some good returns on that investment investment they lead in a lot of these markets they're a very well-run company pricing has been pretty firm for them over the last several years so that's been a nice tailwind and supply has been short in the last several years now they're the the headwinds are there are CPU shortages in the marketplace today and so if you can't can't get the CPU you can't necessarily make the box you can't ship the PC or you can't you know you need you need CPU memory and storage to go together and as a result there's a pending oversupply it looks like and so they're having to manage some of that inventory import tariffs from China not you know that's a I would say huge deal for these guys is something they can manage but you know president Trump's tariff posture it doesn't help a company like micron their tax rate is much higher this year than it was last year it's about going from 4% to like 28% and so those are some of the the headwinds and that's ahead the stock moderate a little bit but the stock has been on fire for the last several years and the company has done very very well cash flow is it's nine billion free cash flow which is important because they have to spend eight billion dollars a year more even they're growing that capex spending from 8 billion this year to 10 and a half billion next year so you get a sense of the various to entry in this marketplace it takes a lot of tenacity which I like micron is exhibited over the last 40 years when you think about all the ebbs and flows but the big changes are this used to be kind of driven by pcs it used to be a PC centered world and now we're seeing a much more diverse customer customer base probably driven by mobile no question about it the data center guys the big hyper scale is the autonomous vehicle folks the industrial internet edge computing they all need memory they all need storage the other piece of this is the transition from spinning hard disk to flash even though it's not a majority of their business today micron is in a very well position very well positioned to take advantage of that David something that you were the first in the industry to call he was a very first analyst that said that SSD flash is going to replace spinning disk it's clearly happening and it happened first in laptops and it's clearly happening in the in the data center you know with some exceptions but generally speaking that trend is pretty substantial you don't absolutely the that the technology changes we keep on saying each year we've witnessed the the most change in technology that we've ever seen and next year it gets faster and it gets faster it's absolutely amazing I think there's another area coming into play when you're looking at the traditional marketplaces they were the PC and the servers that's what we're most of the of the DRAM went we're seeing a change with mobile taking an increasing portion of that you're looking at PCs now they're introducing the the arm pcs as well and then grow ARM processors in the PCs so and that's growing very fast as as well and we're predicting that will go fast and we're looking at also at a very aggressive entry into the market place of ARM processors in general all the way through from from from the edge all the way through up to the top and therefore there's and those are really being designed for this matrix computing I was talking about met much more attention to parallelism to the ability to have GPUs inside it neural networks inside it that is that change and that that that requirement to fit in with this new way of doing is is a fantastic opportunity and they have an opportunity really to lead and powering some of these new workload so we're gonna be unpacking this all all day here at micron inside hashtag micron insight 18 you're watching the cube Dave Volante for David floor we'll be right back right after this short break

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Micron Insight 2018. Brought to you by Micron. >> Welcome back to the Embarcadero everybody here in the heart of San Francisco. Actually at the bay of San Francisco. Golden Gate Bridge is that way, financial district over there, Nob Hill right up the street. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, this is David Floyer, and we're covering the Micron Insight 2018 event. People are starting to filter in. Any minute now we're going to start the keynotes from the executives. A lot of buzz going on, Derek Dicker is here. He's the corporate vice-president and general manager of the storage business unit emerging activity within Micron, great to see you again. >> Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. >> You're very welcome, yeah, so Micron used to be just a straight memory company. We're hearing, we heard at the investor day in May how you guys are diversifying, finding new use cases, new applications, you run the storage business, and of course David Floyer was one of the first, the first, in my opinion, to predict the demise of the hard disk, spinning disk, and it's a tailwind for you guys, but Derek, take us through your business unit, your role, and let's get into it. >> Sure, that sounds great. I appreciate the opportunity again to be here. The storage business unit within Micron is actually comprised across a couple of product areas. Primarily NAND and NAND components, and then also SSDs, solid state drives. As we like to say, and we've talked a bit more about it since Sanjay's arrival, we have a pretty material focus on accelerating what we call high value solutions. It's a big focus of ours, so not only are we developing the core technology in memory and storage, but we're attempting to build more and more products that add value to our customers in the S-System space. But that's generally the storage business focus. Within the company, we have three other business units that focus on compute and networking memory as well as the embedded business unit and then the mobile business unit. >> Talk about some of the big trends that you see, I mean, we've talked about for years, the all-flash data center. We clearly see that in the customers that we work with. Some of the spinning disk guys don't necessarily fully buy into that, but even they have been investing in flash technologies. What are you seeing? >> I tell you, there is no better time, in my opinion, than to be in the memory and storage industry. When you look at what the trends are that are coming out in time. If you go and you stare at how memory and storage has evolved just going back into the 80s or the PC era, a $35 billion average size of the total market. You get into the mobile space, when mobile era started with smart phones, we were looking at a $62 billion-ish, and then in '17 we cleared $120 billion in size of the market, and we actually see a lot of secular trends that are going to continue to take us forward. A couple of things that are particularly noteworthy for us. The first one is the emergence of artificial intelligence, and machine learning, and deep learning. We're going to hear quite a bit about it here at the event. But in terms of a value driver for the consumption of both memory, DRAM, as well as storage, we see it going phenomenally up in content in every server that's purchased out in time. That's one, I think with the evolution of 5G out in time, we're also going to see that smart phone devices are going to end up having more memory to add features like facial recognition we see today, becoming mainstream, multiple cameras, that drives more DRAM content, but then also on top of that, storage is increasing. We're seeing, even today, a terabyte being put into some of the high-end phones, and we know that that's going to waterfall out in time. So I think if you look at this combination of what's happening both in the devices, you look at what's happening in the infrastructure, then you couple that with the processing that needs to happen, it's just an awesome time to be affiliated with memory and storage. >> Yeah, well, I've been following this LAN marketplace for the last, almost 10 years isn't it? More than that. And it's just broken through completely in the last two or three years. What are your thoughts about pushing compute closer and closer to that memory, adding to, for example, the SSDs, the capability of doing smart work? It's very very close to where the data is originally going to be placed? >> It's a great area of quite a bit of R&D work that's going on right now, and I actually think I view this as kind of two stages. One is there's the proliferation of solid state, as you suggested, it's been coming over time. I actually see it increasing dramatically as we look forward, and one of the key technologies that I think is going to enable that is QLC. The fact that we're now at a point where we're putting four bits per cell into devices, SSDs are starting to show up, I think that just creates even more opportunity. And I'll talk a little bit about that in just a minute, but I want to answer your direct question as to how that's changing with AnIML. But I think the ability, once solid state is prolific, to be able to architect systems where you can actually have processing take place closer to the media is a very interesting area. It's right with a ton of research going on right now. People are just starting to implement it. I think there's quite a bit of potential sitting behind it. You know, our focus, of course, is we're deploying, and as quickly as we can, on two vectors. One is, how do we proliferate more solid state into the market as an industry, and the second is how do we add value when we build those solid state drives, so I think it's definitely very viable. >> Let's talk about the significance of QLC. David, your forecasts early on were very aggressive in terms of pricing declines for flash. We kind of, maybe got caught off, a little bit surprised by the-- >> I think we were caught off by the demand. >> Well the demand, but also the supply constraints kept prices up. >> Yeah. >> Okay so, it didn't actually happen as fast. How does QLC change that, Derek, and what's the significance of it? >> Well, the thing that I think is most exciting for us as Micron is we actually ended up delivering the world's first QLC device. It put a terabit of data on a single die, which was unprecedented, but then in addition to that, what we did was we actually built a solid state drive called the 5210 ION. This is a standard drive. It's the worlds first SSD built on the technology, and by being able to develop a solution early on, it allowed us to go engage with customers and find where the right workloads were where we could add the most value. QLC technology actually is perfectly aligned for super read intensive, very read intensive environments, and if you look at what's happening in the data center, we're actually seeing more and more workloads move into more read intensive workloads, and a good chunk of that is just because there's analytics going on. The data's being collected. It's being housed in on place, but as we've talked about quite a bit here at the event, we want to be able to deliver insight out of that data, which means we're going to be reading it quite a bit, and massaging it, and performing analytics on it. And what we're now seeing is what, in the days of the past, was a four to one read to write ratio, we're seeing as high as 5,000 to one and in some cases a million to one. So we get these heavily read intensive workloads coupled with the technology that's optimized for it. It's more power efficient than what rotating media solutions offer in certain workloads, we're starting to see these tremendous values coming out of these early engagements that we're having with customers. >> And does that have implications for longevity, or do you just make an assumption that the read/write ratio is still going to be more write intensive in terms of wear leveling and things like that? How does it change the reliability, if you will, of the technology? >> Actually the beauty is, we're able to deliver an enterprise class SSD with these read/write capabilities that are affiliated with these read intensive solutions, and we can fit within the workloads and the needs that people are talking about. So the drive writes per day that are required in a machine learning infrastructure, we believe we can address with QLC. Same thing with Hadoop style clusters and Ceph clusters. We've actually, as we've gone out and engaged each of our earlier customers, we're able to crank out reference architecture documents that we're now posting to our websites, and we're describing how we can actually leverage this technology to allow us to, in some cases, we'll better optimize where an SSD was used before. But in many, many cases we're actually in the process of displacing hard disk drives. >> So what are the limits of this QLC? How many more bits can we add? How many more layers can we add? >> So, it's actually a great question, David. In terms of what does a roadmap look like. I've been asked in the recent several hours, what the longevity for NAND looks like. And what I'll tell you is this, QLC NAND is just getting its start. What comes after that in terms of bits per cell, I don't think anybody's made any broad claims on. But from a layer stacking perspective, which is kind of the dimension upon which the industry is growing, for the foreseeable future, we see nothing that encumbers us from going substantially higher and higher layer count. Which I think is going to be great for our industry because it's going to allow us to deliver more bits in a given device, and hopefully, that'll allow us to get into markets that, historically, we haven't been able to approach. If you think about the demand elasticity dynamic that occur when we start to bring more and more costs down, the number of applications open up, not unlike the machine learning workloads I just mentioned or Hadoop workloads. We're starting to see more and more thirst and interest for replacing with solid state, just because it's more power efficient, allows for a cost structure that's better, and gives better performance too. >> I'm fond of saying that data's plentiful, insights aren't. You guys are a $30 billion company now. You're making some interesting announcements today that we're going to hear about a little later on that I won't divulge right now, but you're putting your hands in a lot of different places. When you're that size of a company, you can't help but, as you mentioned before, adding more value, becoming more of a systems focus. How do you help the industry go from just raw data to insights? What's your role in that? >> Oh, it's a phenomenal question and this is a major focus of the company. Not just in our business unit, but across all of the different business units in the company. We have a huge focus on sitting down with our customers and getting closer and closer to understanding what their workload needs are, where their paying points are, and then working with them to find solutions, and the beautiful part about it is, as Micron, we're the only company in the world that can combine together a 3D XPoint set of technologies, a NAND set of technologies, a DRAM set of technologies. We go sit down and talk about these challenges with those in mind, plus the emerging memories that we're developing to go develop better and better solutions. But after we're able to come to a solution, we put together a reference architecture, and we deploy it broadly. >> We've been trying to squint through 3D Xpoint and understand the right fit. It seems to us that one of the big advantages of flash was it had the, had this behind it. (laughs) It had the consumer volumes, thank you Steve Jobs. It's unclear whether or not 3D Xpoint will have that, maybe have the same, sort of, cost advantages, but the same time, it sounds like there's new and emerging applications. Like I said, we're trying to figure out. Have you guys figured out yet? You're obviously betting big on the technology. Help us understand where the fit is. >> Sure, I think, you know, if I look back in time, just at the storage hierarchy alone, I don't think the memory hierarchy's any different. You have these portions of the market where you build out hard disk drives, and we had DRAM before, and SSDs came along, and people started asking, not unlike several years back when we talked about the early parts. Hey, how big is this going to get? Cost structures may be prohibitive. But as innovation unfurled, the more time and investment got placed into it, we found new workloads, new use cases we were able to drive costs out, and we ended up slotting in solid state drives squarely. I think this is another tier of memory and storage. That's the beauty of the 3D XP technology. There's both memory semantics and storage semantics that are available for use. I think we're still scratching the surface on the early days, but I love what we're seeing from the customer base that we're engaging and targeting in this space. >> And people will pay up for that performance capability relative to flash. They'll pay down relative to DRAM. Is it, are you seeing a gradience for like the hyperscalers, for example, or is it, maybe the industrial internet? Where are you seeing the. >> It's fair, actually I think, you know, it's probably reasonable to say that, you know, the challenges of inserting a new memory tier into a system requires new programming algorithms, new APIs and interface. There's a lot of ecosystem that needs to be there, as well as, not to mention, you've got to have an ecosystem to go put memory products into a server, for instance, or any other platform. I think we're still early days of enabling all of this. And I also believe we're going to learn more and more where the value of this sits as we put it out there in a cost effective fashion. So I would say that people who control software environments are very, very well suited for this because they can take advantage of some of those challenges without having to have a whole ecosystem in place. I think there's going to be a continued ramp in acceleration as an industry we go build out that ecosystem. >> Well it's been amazing to watch Micron the last several years, I mean, the last several decades. When you were just a pure memory manufacturer which was diversified, you know, gorilla in this space. (laughs) You guys are really an extremely well run company. I mean, your financials have born that out. You're really transparent to the street providing great guidance and congratulations on all of the success. I'm looking forward to watching in the future. >> Oh thank you so much. It's a privilege to be part of the company, and I really appreciate your time today. >> Our pleasure, thanks for coming on theCUBE. All right, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Micron Insight 2018. (upbeat techno music)