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posted by cmn32480 on Friday April 15 2016, @12:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the high-speed dept.

Post-NAND memory/storage technologies that are almost as fast as DRAM (in terms of latency) but denser and cheaper will be arriving in the coming years. One such technology is Intel's 3D XPoint (also branded as "Optane"). Intel has demonstrated the performance of an Optane device at its IDF 2016 keynote in Shenzhen, China:

In the test, Intel used two computer systems. The first system utilized two Intel SATA SSDs to transfer a movie from the host machine to a Thunderbolt 3-connected device using another Intel SATA SSD. The transfer performance clearly shows a TLC-based SATA device--most likely the company's new SSD 540 or 5400 Series business-class drive. The second computer transferred the same movie file over Thunderbolt 3, but this time the host and destination media were based on Optane memory technology.

On the surface, the 2 GB/s transfer was impressive. The performance was consistent and didn't take much time. Upon closer inspection, though, this was the worst possible demonstration of Optane technology Intel could have shown. The company's own SSD 750 Series could have produced similar results.

The demonstration the world is waiting on involves random performance; it's the one area Optane changes storage for consumers. We won't see Optane technology in a data backup device for a decade or more, but a small amount of Optane to cache TLC NAND will go a long way in improving the user experience. If Intel doesn't arrange a public demonstration, we will have to wait until the second half of 2017 when we get our own Optane devices to run the tests ourselves.

At IDF 2015 in San Francisco Intel displayed a static image of Optane reading random data at 76,000 IOPS using queue depth 1. That is a full 7x improvement over the company's current NVMe-based consumer SSDs.

In other news, Everspin has begun to ship samples of 256 Mb Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM). Crossbar tried to remind everyone that it still exists. The last time we saw HP/HPE, it had seemingly abandoned "memristors" to work on the generically-named Storage-Class Memory with SanDisk. Intel could become the first to bring post-NAND memory to the consumer market with XPoint devices with capacities of at least 16-32 GB priced at $2-4/GB, enough to store an operating system and some applications.


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Intel and Micron Announce 3D XPoint, A New Type of Memory and Storage 17 comments

Intel and Micron have announced a new type of non-volatile memory called "3D XPoint", which they say is 1,000 times faster (in terms of latency) than the NAND flash used in solid-state disks, with 1,000 times the endurance. It also has 10 times the density of DRAM. It is a stackable, 20nm, technology, and is expected to be sold next year in a 128 Gb (16 GB) size:

If all goes to plan, the first products to feature 3D XPoint (pronounced cross-point) will go on sale next year. Its price has yet to be announced. Intel is marketing it as the first new class of "mainstream memory" since 1989. Rather than pitch it as a replacement for either flash storage or Ram (random access memory), the company suggests it will be used alongside them to hold certain data "closer" to a processor so that it can be accessed more quickly than before.

[...] 3D XPoint does away with the need to use the transistors at the heart of Nand chips... By contrast, 3D XPoint works by changing the properties of the material that makes up its memory cells to either having a high resistance to electricity to represent a one or a low resistance to represent a zero. The advantage is that each memory cell can be addressed individually, radically speeding things up. An added benefit is that it should last hundreds of times longer than Nand before becoming unreliable.

It is expected to be more expensive than NAND, cheaper than DRAM, and slower than DRAM. If a 16 GB chip is the minimum XPoint offering, it could be used to store an operating system and certain applications for a substantial speedup compared to SSD storage.

This seems likely to beat similar fast and non-volatile "NAND-killers" to market, such as memristors and Crossbar RRAM. Intel and Micron have worked on phase-change memory (PCM) previously, but Intel has denied that XPoint is a PCM, memristor, or spin-transfer torque based technology. The Platform speculates that the next-generation 100+ petaflops supercomputers will utilize XPoint, along with other applications facing memory bottlenecks such as genomics analysis and gaming. The 16 GB chip is a simple 2-layer stack, compared to 32 layers for Samsung's available V-NAND SSDs, so there is enormous potential for capacity growth.

The technology will be sampling later this year to potential customers. Both Micron and Intel will develop their own 3D XPoint products, and will not be licensing the technology.


Original Submission

SanDisk and HP Announce Potential Competitor to XPoint Memory 5 comments

HP and SanDisk have announced the development of Storage-Class Memory, a technology with attributes similar to Intel and Micron's 3D XPoint ("crosspoint") memory:

HP and SanDisk are joining forces to combat the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint memory threat, and developing their own Storage-Class Memory (SCM) technology.

SCM is persistent memory that runs at DRAM or near-DRAM speed but is less costly, enabling in-memory computing without any overhead of writing to slower persistent data storage such as flash or disk through a CPU cycle-gobbling IO stack. It requires both hardware and software developments. Micron and Intel's XPoint memory is claimed to be 1,000 times faster than flash with up to 1,000 times flash's endurance. Oddly enough HP and SanDisk say their SCM technology is also "expected to be up to 1,000 times faster than flash storage and offer up to 1,000 times more endurance than flash storage."

[...] The partnership's aim is to create enterprise-class products for Memory-driven Computing and also to build better data centre SSDs. The Storage-Class Memory deal is more long-term: "Our partnership to collaborate on new SCM technology solutions is expected to revolutionise computing in the years ahead."

[...] It's not yet known what the XPoint cell process is, beyond being told it's a bulk change to the material but not a phase-change. Analyst Jim Handy has written an XPoint report which said HP had abandoned its Memristor technology. This SanDisk partnership implies that this point is incorrect.

The HP/SanDisk duo also intend to contribute to HP's Machine concept, "which reinvents the fundamental architecture of computers to enable a quantum leap in performance and efficiency, while lowering costs and improving security."

As we previously reported, Intel and Micron plan to release SSD and DIMM XPoint-based products in 2016, with Intel marketing them under the brand name "Optane".

Is HP's memristor partnership with Hynix obsolete? Will HP Enterprise finally give birth to "The Machine" and change supercomputing? Will Crossbar's ReRAM wither and die, or will the company join the fray and compete to produce the ultimate post-NAND memory?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @12:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @12:37PM (#332197)

    Which movie was it? Was it a 2D or 3D movie file?

    It was a copy of the new GoT for Obama, wasn't it?

    Also, which Alphabet soup agency is paying you to support Thunderbolt 3, and isn't its DMA hard to get right from a security standpoint?