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.
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wishgranter - Saturday, August 1, 2015 - link
As always, waited for Anand to tear it to the point and explain it as they did it,this is stuff that differ you from other "news" sites... So let see what they bring to market...
azazel1024 - Saturday, August 1, 2015 - link
Great, so now I need to get a boot drive again.DRAM, XPOINT boot drive, SSD application drive and HDD bulk storage. Maybe we can usher in holographic storage and have another tier! I mostly kid, but man getting excessive. It would be cool if this was added in through new/advanced memory controllers and utilize the DRAM slots. If the price is at least reasonably less than DRAM (by at least a factor of 2), I can see uses. A legit OS drive space. Useful for higher end tablets and stuff with embedded high speed storage. A serious swap disk, etc.
16GB of RAM with 32-64GB of XPOINT and then the SSD/HDD storage systems would probably make a pretty wicked system. Use the XPOINT to do things like load large parts of games/applications in a super fast swap disk pre-loading as much as possible and then quickly import the parts in to RAM that are needed instead of slower imports from SSD/HDD to RAM.
A little disappointed that this doesn't sound like it'll be remotely economical to compete with NAND anytime soon. I had my hopes up with the density claims and what not that we might have a NAND replacement at HDD price per GB in a couple of years.
userDavid - Saturday, August 1, 2015 - link
"SPoint" is my guess for pronunciation. If the marketing idiots can't spell out "3D CrossPoint", I don't think we're obliged to pronounce it that way.jay401 - Saturday, August 1, 2015 - link
"A quick look at NewEgg puts DRAM pricing at approximately $5-6 per gigabyte, whereas the high-end enterprise SSDs are in the range of $2-3. While client SSDs can be had for as low as $0.35, they aren't really a fair comparison because at least initially 3D XPoint will be aimed for enterprise applications. My educated guess is that the first 3D XPoint based products will be priced at about $4 per gigabyte, possibly even slightly lower depending on how DRAM and NAND pricess fall within a year."Oh, okay, see you in five years or so, when this technology becomes relevant to the consumer. @___@
Crazy1 - Saturday, August 1, 2015 - link
I hate that Intel and Micron didn't talk about potential uses for this new technology. Letting my imagination run wild, I'm thinking small, battery powered embedded solutions is a good starting point. Basically IoT devices, from infrastructure sensors on up to smart watches. There are not many market standards in place in this category of computing devices and energy efficiency is more important than high performance. This XPoint tech could replace both NAND and DRAM in these devices, presumably increasing energy efficiency. It also provides small, adaptable platforms for developers to start programming for applications with no RAM.I don't see XPoint replacing DRAM and NAND in smartphones and tablets any time soon. I assume it will take a while before OSes and apps can adapt to a no RAM environment. It will take a few SoC generations for this tech to have hardware support as well (unless they were already in-the-know). Smaller issues include degraded performance in RAM heavy applications (i.e. graphics processing) and increased hardware costs. The GPU might need its own RAM buffer (might I suggest HBM), further increasing implementation costs. Also, encrypted storage gets a little costly, from an energy perspective, when that storage bandwidth is very fast. Ideally, there will be a hardware encryption accelerator in the mix (and the OS will implement it (looking at you Android)).
However, there are a lot of potential benefits to replacing RAM and NAND completely with XPoint from a smart phone. The device could turn on and off almost instantly. Power management would not need to deal with the energy costs of shuffling around large amounts of data to enter and exit a sleep state. OSes and apps would be smaller and more efficient due to significantly reduced memory management concerns (some minimal wear leveling and ECC).
The first implementation of XPoint in smartphones/tablets will probably be as an added cache to accelerate the NAND and act as a swap partition. The NAND eMMC in most smart phones is more competitive with a modern HDD than a SSD when it comes to transfer speeds, so the NAND could definitely use a boost.
The day XPoint replaces NAND SSD's in the consumer space will be glorious. If speculation on price is correct, it may be a while before even the average enthusiast can rationalize the expense. However, I did see an Intel video that described DRAM as expensive and both XPoint and NAND as inexpensive. So, it would stand to reason that XPoint would be closer to the price of NAND than DRAM once initial market shock has subsided a bit and production has ramped up. However, Intel is rarely known to offer inexpensive products compared to its competition, so the real hope is that Micron pushes this technology at a price and quantity that stimulates quick market adoption.
Brane2 - Saturday, August 1, 2015 - link
How the heck can you "analyze" something that you know practically nothing about ?All you have is a bit of marketing fluff and you are building virtual castles out of that....
Laststop311 - Saturday, August 1, 2015 - link
maybe bias is affecting me but it seems the quality of articles has gone down since this site was sold and anand left.Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 3, 2015 - link
Could you elaborate? I think this article in particular is far more in-depth than any of the other articles I've read on the topic and it really goes into great detail about the physics side as well.speculatrix - Sunday, August 2, 2015 - link
typo "either slower, non-volitile memory" - volAtileVetri33 - Sunday, August 2, 2015 - link
There is NO mention of the error rate in 3D Xpoint compare to Enterprise NAND!?. This may make a big difference in Enterprise SSD Controller architecture & implementation like whether LDPC, BCH or a very simple Error Correction algorithm is good enough!?. The power is an another big factor especially in Write, One of the main limiting factor in enterprise SSD write performance is the power budget.