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posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 30 2016, @03:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the hear-the-silence dept.

CNET reports:

They've been a fixture of the computing industry for 60 years, but in 2018, hard drives will be pushed aside by storage systems using memory chips in PCs, an analyst firm predicts. [...] SSDs no longer are exotic. This year, 33 percent of PCs sold will come with SSDs, but that should grow to 56 percent in 2018, analyst firm TrendForce forecast Monday.

They predicted 44% adoption in 2017. SSD prices are expected to drop to $0.17/GB in 2017, a direct result of new generations of 3D/vertical NAND.

As for those 3D XPoint post-NAND devices coming from Intel and Micron, the initial capacities could be closer to 140 GB than the 16-32 GB I originally expected.


Original Submission

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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

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:12PM (#395318)

    TrendForce, Gartner etc all remind me of this: http://skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html [skepdic.com]

    Or like some guy said, everyone pees into the analyst firm's cup then pay to drink their own pee back.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:13PM (#395320)

    Modern games have gotten so huge that you need an SSD unless you like staring at a loading screen for 5+ minutes. I've been on the tail end of adoption, but I'll need to get one if Star Citizen ever releases. Fallout 4's loading was just barely on the inside of don't mind.

    Will still keep the 3TB drive for the movie and TV collection. Interesting to see how far SSD prices have fallen, though.

    • (Score: 2) by julian on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:18PM

      by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:18PM (#395351)

      The next time I touch my last remaining Windows machine will be to upgrade it for Battlefield 1, but that won't be until the game is at least a year old. EA takes that much time to work out the bugs, release the content they held back at release as extra "expansion packs" for $30 each, and finally bring the price to come down to something reasonable.

      That computer has a 120GB SSD and after Windows 10 Pro + Battlefield 1 and expansions there'll hardly be any space left. Games, and Windows, have gotten BIG.

  • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:28PM

    by richtopia (3160) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:28PM (#395328) Homepage Journal

    The SSD is one of those upgrades that everyone really feels the difference in. And for laptops the SSD should be easier to locate thanks to the form factor (M.2 interface is smaller than the 2.5" drives). On top of all that the trend is for data to be in the cloud, so people can live quite happily with 128GB of storage.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:22PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:22PM (#395355)

      > On top of all that the trend is for data to be in the cloud

      Try to push 1TB of data into the cloud from most US locations, and suddenly redundant spinning rust doesn't sounds too bad.
      Of course, most humans do need to realize that they probably don't need to store that TB of data, because they won't really get back to that 4K special effects editing they had in mind... 64GB ought to be enough for anyone browsing facebook and ordering from Amazon.

      • (Score: 4, Touché) by requerdanos on Tuesday August 30 2016, @06:37PM

        by requerdanos (5997) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 30 2016, @06:37PM (#395392) Journal

        64GB ought to be enough for anyone

        Just wow.

        • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday August 30 2016, @07:33PM

          by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @07:33PM (#395402)

          That's only a compounded 39% yearly increase from the original 35 years ago.

          Would you have preferred "640G for anyone", which would be a 48% average annual growth?

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Tuesday August 30 2016, @07:54PM

          by RamiK (1813) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @07:54PM (#395408)

          I've seen 64\128GB RAM systems without an SSD. To quote the owner: That's what tmpfs is for.

          --
          compiling...
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @10:32PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @10:32PM (#395480)

          No, back in the day, 48 KB was enough for anyone and was luxury. Most systems were 4K-16K. Except for that stupid Commodore 64!

          And then I got a 5 1/4" Disc Drive that could store 100KB PER DISK!!!

          I was a Senior in High School when I saw a networked 5 MB "Hard Drive." Why anyone would ever have needed 1 MB, let alone 5, was beyond me.

          Now, do you want me to tell you about this "Laser" that could be used to destroy Washington, DC, using my "Death Star" in the plan we now call "The Alan Parsons Project?" No? Then pay me 1 MILL-ION DOLLARS!

      • (Score: 2) by Teckla on Wednesday August 31 2016, @04:46PM

        by Teckla (3812) on Wednesday August 31 2016, @04:46PM (#395736)

        Try to push 1TB of data into the cloud from most US locations, and suddenly redundant spinning rust doesn't sounds too bad.

        Normal people should keep their data in the cloud, because normal people do not keep backups, for several reasons:

        • They're lazy, too busy, or both
        • It's simply technically too hard (this is a failure of the software industry, not a failure of non-technical people)
        • A backup isn't a backup if it's onsite
        • Spinning rust fails too often

        I empathize with the pain of the initial "big backup" to the cloud, but it's really what the vast majority of people should be using.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by SrLnclt on Tuesday August 30 2016, @07:28PM

      by SrLnclt (1473) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @07:28PM (#395401)

      I concur... I'm surprised this didn't pass the 50% market share for new sales a while back. I wouldn't buy or recommend a machine for anyone without a SSD (for home or at work), and have felt that way for the last 18 months or so. Someone was just asking me about a new home laptop (typical novice user on a budget... email, youtube, facebook). A SSD was one of just a couple items I recommended. It's one of the single best things you can do to a machine these days if you are used to a spinning drive. The only reason my desktop at home doesn't have one is it's 5-7 years old, and I've been trying to decide if I should get one to kick the can down the road, or just replace the whole machine in the next year.

    • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday August 30 2016, @09:54PM

      by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @09:54PM (#395466)

      On top of all that the trend is for data to be in the cloud

      None of the data I care about is in the cloud. It is all under my control.
      What will happen when your cloud provider turns off access?

  • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:32PM

    by richtopia (3160) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:32PM (#395332) Homepage Journal

    By comparison, consumer SSDs were selling for 99 cents a gigabyte in 2012. From 2013 to 2015, the price dropped from 68 cents to 39 cents per gigabyte. This year, SSD prices declined to 24 cents per gigabyte and in 2017, they're expected to drop another 7 cents. That means a 1TB SSD, on average, would retail for $170.

    The summary had me really excited for the new 3D NAND. But the price will not be 7 cents per GB (HDD is somewhere around 6 cents per GB). The price will be closer to 17 cents per GB, which is still something to be excited for.

  • (Score: 2) by chewbacon on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:33PM

    by chewbacon (1032) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:33PM (#395361)

    Bought a hybrid for my laptop and noticed a great balance of performance vs price. So I dumped a little more cash for just a SSD for my desktop and... wow. My desktop is about 5 years old, but now performs better than when it was new. Saved myself a new build. If you're using Windows, don't waste your time trying to buy a smaller SSD and a big HDD to save maybe $60-80. It is difficult to determine your true needs for that and you'll save a lot of effort and wasted hours just buying the big SSD.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by tibman on Tuesday August 30 2016, @06:25PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 30 2016, @06:25PM (#395387)

    Spinning drives only seem useful for archiving now. SSD is the way to go for OS, games, and day to day stuff. 250 GB for under 100$ is pretty good, imo. You can even get them as PCI-e cards now and reduce your cabling nightmare. There's probably some interesting tiny box builds you could do by removing the drive cage. Example PCI-e SSD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104544 [newegg.com]

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  • (Score: 1) by wcvanhorne on Wednesday August 31 2016, @02:50AM

    by wcvanhorne (2197) on Wednesday August 31 2016, @02:50AM (#395559)

    I can't believe *any* systems are still being sold with HDDs as OS/System drives!

    I replaced all my HDDs with SSDs over 3 years ago (10 PCs and laptops in my family) and that was probably the single biggest performance boost you can imagine! I bought all Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB SSDs and they were just over CAD $200. Now half my fleet is about 7 years old (Core2 duos) and still perform great for productivity use (not gaming) running Windows 10.

    Spinning storage should never be used for anything except A/V library.