Analyzing Intel-Micron 3D XPoint: The Next Generation Non-Volatile Memory
by Kristian Vättö, Ian Cutress & Ryan Smith on July 31, 2015 11:00 AM ESTFinal Thoughts
3D XPoint has a lot to chew on. There hasn't been an announcement this big in the memory industry since the invention of NAND in 1989 and while DRAM and NAND have improved and scaled a lot over the decades, 3D XPoint is really a new class of memory. It's fast, durable, scalable and non-volatile, whereas DRAM and NAND each only meet two of these criteria. It fills the niche between DRAM and NAND by taking the best characteristics of both technologies and creating a memory unlike anything we have seen before.
The significance of the announcement isn't just the new memory technology, but that it's actually in production with volume shipments scheduled for next year. Intel and Micron have succeeded in bringing a concept from a lab to an actual fab, which is by far the most difficult part in any new semiconductor technology. Something that works well in a lab may not be mass producible at all, but Intel and Micron made the necessary investments to develop new material compounds and surrounding technologies to turn 3D XPoint into a real product. It will be interesting to see how the other DRAM and NAND vendors respond because the memory industry is one where you don't want your rivals to have something you don't for an extended period of time.
However, it's clear that 3D XPoint isn't a true DRAM or NAND successor and Intel and Micron aren't trying to position it as such. DRAM will still have its market in high performance applications that require the latency and endurance that 3D XPoint can't offer. Our early cost analysis also suggests that 3D XPoint isn't as dense as planar NAND, let alone 3D NAND, but by having the ability to scale both vertically and horizontally 3D XPoint may have the potential to replace 3D NAND in the long run.
Looking further into the future, 3D XPoint isn't the only technology Intel and Micron are cooking. If the two stay on schedule, we should be hearing about their other new memory technology in roughly two years. As 3D XPoint seems to be more suitable as a 3D NAND replacement, the second new technology might be one that is capable of taking DRAM's place in the long run.
All in all, it's impossible to think of all the possible applications that 3D XPoint will have in the future because it's a technology that hasn't existed before. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that 3D XPoint has the potential to change modern computer architectures and the way we see computing, but that transition won't happen overnight and will likely require competing technologies from other vendors to fulfill the demand. What is clear, though, is that Intel and Micron are leading us to a new era of memory and computing next year.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
80 Comments
View All Comments
Alexvrb - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
I don't think so... this is slower than current RAM. They aren't very likely to use HBM only on an APU for various reasons, so you're still going to be using something like DDR4 for your main memory. Which again, is faster than this XPoint tech.XPoint is however a lot denser than RAM, and it's non-volatile so it will make excellent high-speed storage if we can get a better interface. I think in a few years we could at least be using it as a cache for NAND devices or as "boot drives" similar to how we were using then-costly NAND-based SSDs not so long ago.
lilmoe - Monday, August 3, 2015 - link
If we're talking more in a "conventional" non-enterprise, consumer/professional product sense, then I believe this type of memory would be more of a complement to eDRAM (or other forms of higher density, lower speed cache memory), with DRAM completely omitted from the hierarchy. But this may fundamentally change the way operating systems and applications work, and depending on design/application, may lead to breakthrough performance gains.Scoobmx - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
Ian, I have some serious doubts that this is STT-MRAM. The endurance and density numbers don't really line up. STT has virtually limitless endurance but fairly poor density due to the high current required, hence the need for a large transistor. I don't have the hubris to claim that it's impossible, but I believe it highly unlikely. Source: completed my dissertation in nanomagnetic logic and memory devices last year.J03_S - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
It might very well be Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropic Magnetic Tunneling Junction STT-MRAM. It's a variant of STT-MRAM that does not suffer from the density issues and is more than one order of magnitude efficient than Spin torque transfer. It was covered in the AIP journal and published back in April of 2014 by Luc Thomas and associates. At the time they had IBM producing chips for them as the entire process is fully compatible with the existing CMOS backend and requires no special changes be made to the process. This expedited the research quite a bit as they were able to test fully functioning chips.jjj - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
About the positioning in the market you are being a bit misleading initially.The technology itsalf is likely able to compete with NAND in pricing,there would be a process and layers race but it could be doable.
So it's not really in between NAND and DRAM, cost wise, at least that's not a must, it will cost us a lot more than NAND because Intel and Micron will milk the hell out of it.
About output, that's a startegy matter, the goal being to maximize profits ,nothing else matters. The 2 companies are trying to justify their initial prices and markets by placing it inthe middle- sure it is in the middle perf wise and cost is likely higher for now than the most efficient NAND.
When you comment about power vs NAND you forget to say that it would be per bit and that's kinda relevant.
When you talk about how the laywer are made and costs, it would be important to point out that 3D NAND has very poor planar density compared to 2D NAND. the density here seems to be very close to 2D NAND density. You make it sound like it would cost a lot more than 3D NAND and don't think that's a case at all. Sure maybe it's 2-4 times more than more for now but that's not too far and it's a lot cheaper than RAM. Yes scaling the layers seems costlier here than with 3D NAND.
When talking die size it stops being as misleading as some previous bits. On die size it looks more like 18+ dies and close to 23 so some 13x16mm for 208-ish mm2.
High cell efficiency would be good too when scaling soif they go 16nm 4 layers in gen 2,it would be interesting.
Micron can double it's profits once they max that facility (and Intel takes half) , i was assuming they'll push SSDs at 4-5$ per GB too but i'm sure they'll try to go even higher if they can.
As far as i know PCI 4.0 was due in 2017 so not too far away.
You keep pushing their agenda at the end about where it can go. Look, DDR3 is some 4.5$ per GB, DDR4 getting close to 6.5$ per GB , 128Gb NAND is some 5$ but the range is pretty wide for NAND (3.5-6$). Could they sell it in phones at 1-2$ per GB? Easily, but they won't at first ,it's more profitable not to. Will they do it in gen 2-3, yeah they will. They need to expand it slowly before others have their own 3D ReRAM slutions and have a solid base by that time,whilemaking a lot of money with it in the few years of monopoly.
Ofc in phones they can go for 4-8GB at 3$ per GB and lesser RAM to save power. Don't forget power in phones, just on that and it's worth using a hybrid RAM/ReRAM in high end.
So overall i think you fail to make a clear distinction between the technology and the financial strategy. The big limitation in adoption is the very high margins, the technology itself seems plenty capable and cheap. In IoT could be interesting too when it gets cheap enough but it's not ideal since it's not quite as cheap and dense as the industry would like, a lot more is needed there long term.
Anyway, great that we have this 5 or more years before it was expected, not so great (for us) that it might take a while before prices become accessible for consumers. At least this forces others to accelerate their ReRAM roadmaps.
zodiacfml - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
Hmm, I think I know why Intel is so invested in this. This will eventually replace NAND drives as performance storage while current NAND drives of today becomes the cold, backup storage replacing the spinning disk drives. I feel that 3D-NAND has more potential for higher density and lower power versus disks. It might become more cost effective or cheaper than hard disks when OEMs starts using NAND in cheap and mid range PCs because of the scale and less buyers of the hard disks.DrKlahn - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
I think short term you may see Intel and Micron put a small amount of Xpoint as a read/write cache onto their Enterprise and performance oriented SSD's. It would give them a decent performance advantage with a price bump modest enough to still attract consumers.Drumsticks - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
I've been looking forward to this writeup! I work in NSG at Intel (the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group i.e. the people developing 3D XPoint) and we've been super excited for this reveal.It's fun to see the industry analysis, and as always Anandtech has one of the most in-depth!
Vlad_Da_Great - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
@Drumsticks. Keep the good work, the world is moving thanks to people like you and INTC as a company. Thank you!!!jjj - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
Forgot to mention that in a promo video they claim SSDs with this would be up to 10x faster over PCIe/NVMe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=184&v=Wgk4U4qV...No idea how they do the math ofc so i wouldn't expect 10x random.