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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Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 3, 2015 - link
That's a good point and admittedly something I didn't think about. I would assume 3D XPoint is more robust than NAND given the higher performance and endurance, but Intel/Micron declined to talk about any failure mechanisms, so at this point it's hard to say how robust the technology is.Nilth - Sunday, August 2, 2015 - link
Well, I really hope it won't take 10 years to see this technology at the consumer level.dotpex - Monday, August 3, 2015 - link
From Micron site https://www.micron.com/about/innovations/3d-xpoint..."Memory cells are accessed and written or read by varying the amount of voltage sent to each selector. This eliminates the need for transistors, increasing capacity and reducing cost."
...but 3d xpoint will be expensive, more like $10 per gigabyte.
Adam Bise - Friday, August 7, 2015 - link
"First and foremost, Intel and Micron are making it clear that they are not positioning 3D XPoint as a replacement technology for either NAND or DRAM"I wonder if this is because they would rather create a new market than replace an existing one.
hans_ober - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
@Ian. PhD Chem was useful! :)Ian Cutress - Monday, September 28, 2015 - link
Yiss :)duartix - Monday, August 10, 2015 - link
I see two immediate consumer usages:a) Instant Go To / Wake From deep hibernation
b) Scratch disks
MRFS - Monday, August 24, 2015 - link
With proper UEFI/BIOS support, one feature we proposed in a Provisional Patent Application was a "Format RAM" option prior to running Windows Setup. This would format RAM as an NTFS C: partition into which Windows software would be freshly installed. For comparison purposes, imagine a ramdisk in the upper 32-to-64GB of a large 1-to-2 TB DRAM subsystem, in a manner similar to how SuperSpeed's RamDisk Plus allocates RAM addresses. Then, imagine that all 2 TB consist of Non-Volatile DIMMs. I can see this one feature enabling very rapid RESTARTS, even cold RESTARTS after a full power-down (for maintenance). If the UEFI/BIOS is told that the OS is already memory-resident, this one change radically improves the speed with which a routine STARTUP occurs i.e. currently a STARTUP must load all OS software from a storage subsystem into RAM. If that OS software is already loaded into RAM, that "loading" is mostly eliminated under these new assumptions. Moreover, mounting Optane on the 2.5" form factor should free designers to consider more aggressive overclocking of the data cables connecting motherboards to those 2.5" drives: just work backwards from PCIe 4.0's 16GHz clock and 128b/130b jumbo frame. It's possible that Optane will be fast enough to justify data cables that also oscillate at 16GHz, increasing to 32GHz with predictable success. Assuming x4 NVMe lanes at PCIe 4.0, then 4 lanes @ (16G / 8.125) ~= 4 lanes @ 2GB/s ~= 8 GB/s raw bandwidth per 2.5" device. Modern G.Skill DDR4 easily exceeds 25GB/s raw bandwidth. Thus, Optane should allow "overclocked" data cables to achieve blistering NVMe storage performance with JBOD devices, and even higher performance with RAID-0 arrays.FutureCTO - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
I don't know, is it possible to have an educated guess on this? Back in the PS2 days, before the PS3, i was @0zyx on forum or few, talking about NASA RAM, magnet donuts on a metal grid of wires, insisting why don't we do this with memory today? The electricity crosses and creates a charge or reads the charge. This is the RAM of the first space computer. ~ I was made confident by believing this is what AMD "Mirror Bit" Memory was working towards before it flat out evaporated from the internet? Same happened to 48Bit Intel "Iranium" processors with 16cores. Still look in books from time to time, hoping an old edition of hardware lists with intel spy cpu, will confirm the internet is a BlackHole. Not to go Ellery Hale, with being one of those to store curious science bits no one is using, and everyone should be clamoring to own some day. ~ I check the metal recycling at the city dump for computer servers and extra high grade tower cases for my own builds, at least a parts from the towers anyways. ~ Twitter @0zyx ~ either way this is the memory design from the first NASA space capsule to carry people into space, except larger than 1 kilobyte. It may have been 512Bytes back then, not sure what sort of grid that is?FutureCTO - Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - link
educated guess on price? ~ To me it is simpler to make, and faster to verify trace integrity.