Intel 3D Xpoint (New storage architecture)

colinmcr

colinmcr

colinmcr

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Thought I'd share here, in case its not been seen yet.

"Intel and Micron have a new way to store data that they say is denser, tougher, and faster than the competition, and it's already starting production. In a live keynote today, the companies announced 3D Xpoint, a new category of non-volatile memory that claims to be 1,000 times faster than the NAND architecture underlying most flash memory cards and solid state drives. The new architecture does without transistors entirely, relying on a bulk material property change to switch bits from a low-resistance to a high-resistance state. From there, memory cells are layered in an intricate three-dimensional checkerboard pattern that Intel researchers say is 10 times denser than conventional memory."

http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/28/9058393/intels-micron-memory-3D-xpoint-speed

UPDATED Overview from Anandtech, good read
 
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Sounds amazing technology, but how long will it take to get it to market, and what is the interface going to be to handle such speed?
 
Interesting development and it'll be exciting to see how it pans out - though I don't like the fairly misleading claims made. The 1000x faster isn't related to it's speed but rather it's latency when wanting to rewrite single bits - hardly your standard consumer SSD use-case where we can buffer our writes faster than this can throughput them then catch up with ourselves anyway. It's unclear how much gain there will be in read latency yet which would be more interesting.

I'm not trying to put down the tech, looks cool and should enable some interesting use-cases (especially in the server market I'd have thought) and maybe if manufacturing costs fall dramatically eventually make it's way into the consumer space. As a new memory type we'll probably only see the real gains when we use it differently rather than trying to use it as a 'better flash' or whatever.
 
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Very excited about this. I wonder if it could ever be fast enough to be a replacement for dram, instant on computing would be fantastic.
 
This is very interesting, I currently have an 840 Pro 512gb and have no need for more space or an extra SSD at the moment, but I will definitely be looking out for drives based on this tech in the future.

I'm assuming it will be a similar situation to when SSD's were first coming around in the fact that you will get a lot more speed but less storage for the cost. If it really affects overall performance of the PC noticeably again over an SSD then I will be looking to get one.

In fact this will probably be the next thing I upgrade to.
 
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