I don’t pretend to understand the subtleties of flash memory manufacturing. But I think what’s happened here is that Hynix has contrived a way to put three bits instead of two into each cell, increasing the data density of a chip by 50% – or reducing the size by 30%. Before now they could only do this on 16GB NAND modules, but now they’re doing it for 32GB ones.
High fives to these guys, people. These engineers are the ones who make it all possible.