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What Next for 3D XPoint? Micron to Buy Intel's Share in 3D XPoint Fab
Micron on Thursday announced plans to acquire Intel's stake in IM Flash Technologies, a joint venture between the two companies. IM Flash owns a fab near Lehi, Utah, which is the only producer of 3DXPoint memory that Intel uses for its premium Optane-branded solid-state storage products. Once the transaction is completed, Intel will have to ink a supply agreement with Micron to get 3D XPoint memory after the current agreement finishes at the end of 2019. This will have important ramifications for Intel's 3D XPoint-based portfolio.
Under the terms of the joint venture agreement between Intel and Micron signed in 2005, the latter controls 51% of company and has a right to acquire the remaining share under certain conditions. Intel already sold Micron its stakes in IM Flash fabs in Singapore and Virginia back in 2012, which left IM Flash with only one production facility near Lehi, Utah (pictured below). The fab is used exclusively to produce 3D XPoint memory right now.
[...] While Intel will continue to obtain 3D XPoint from IM Flash until at least mid-2020, there is a big catch. The two companies are set to finish development of their 2nd Gen 3D XPoint [sometime] in the second or the third quarter of calendar 2019. The joint development takes place in IM Flash R&D facilities and the design is tailored for the IM Flash fab and jointly-developed process technology. Therefore, the transaction may potentially affect Intel's ramp up plans for the 2nd Gen 3D XPoint memory. In fact, Intel can manufacture 3D XPoint memory at Fab 68 in Dalian, China, the company said earlier this year. However, since the fab is busy making 3D NAND, Intel may have to adjust its production plans for both types of memory.
Related: Intel and Micron Boost 3D XPoint Production
Intel Announces 3D XPoint Persistent Memory DIMMs
Micron: 96-Layer 3D NAND Coming, 3D XPoint Sales Disappoint
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Sunday October 21 2018, @03:21PM (3 children)
Thanks for posting articles like this, I find it quite interesting as I once worked at a Micron facility.
I wonder what drove them to buyout Intel? If it is to price gouge customers on the XPoint product, I think Micron will have troubles finding customers. It would make more sense if Micron is buying IMFT strictly for control of the Lehi fab so they could produce more units of traditional products at that fab and completely drop the XPoint product.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday October 21 2018, @07:48PM (1 child)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/10/19/micron_buy_out_intel_flash_joint_venture/ [theregister.co.uk]
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/micron-s-plans-to-buy-out-intel-s-jv-stake-strengthen-its-data-center-hand-14751396 [thestreet.com]
They had the option available and are taking it.
Intel's out here getting that Big Bang Theory actor to promote 3D XPoint in television commercials. But consumer awareness or interest in XPoint is low. Micron skipped the first generation of the technology and will probably focus on enterprise customers more.
Too bad XPoint is not the magical post-NAND technology [regmedia.co.uk] we were dreaming of. Just another tier sandwiched uncomfortably between NAND and DRAM.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Monday October 22 2018, @07:01AM
I see a spot for XPoint in enterprise for swap, database cache, ZFS L2ARC, and such where you're maxed out the ram on the motherboard, but you're not ready for replacing the motherboard. However, since that is such a small market in comparison to NAND, the point of my previous post, I think Micron will repurpose the Lehi fab to increase capacity for NAND flash and let XPoint go to the wayside. They'll likely let Intel continue to produce XPoint, but it will be done at Intel's fabs. Since the market is so small for XPoint, Micron will not risk competing against Intel on a lackluster product.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday October 22 2018, @05:31PM
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13502/intel-micron-imft [anandtech.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday October 21 2018, @04:29PM
That box is slow as molasses. However it has two Thunderbolt 2 ports. Or when the AppleCare expires I could put in an internal SATA.
I use my mini for coding drivers because they never take long to compile. I use my MacBook Pro to test them because it boots so fast - it's storage is flash on a PCIe card.
I just have to sing on the street until I get enough tips. When I sing I make roughly six bucks an hour. I figure I'll make more once I learn to plan my keyboard while singing. I can sing, I can play piano but I can't sing and play piano at the same time. But that is a skill one can learn.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday October 21 2018, @04:39PM (1 child)
Out of idle curiosity, I was wondering if the gumstick-format Optane drive, the 800p, would work in the m.2 2280 slot on a given AM4 board. It's not really a good investment compared to a decent 64-layer TLC drive but it's an interesting proposition and has amazingly low latency ad tiny queue depths. No matter where I look, though, I can't find anything definite about this.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MrNemesis on Sunday October 21 2018, @11:59PM
Assuming you're using linux, any PCIe M2 slot should see optane just fine, be it on an AMD or Intel board. I'm not using that combination currently, but my first-gen optane M2 workload fine on my 2400G motherboard as a regular block device. IIRC it's only if you want to use them under windows that you're restricted to Intel kit by way of their drivers, because segmentation.
That said, it's a rare workload that'll benefit greatly from an optane drive; I bought one also out of idle curiosity mainly because the tiny 16GB gumstick had reached "toy" prices when the 800p came out and I figured it'd be nice to see if it would benefit me. Currently it's sitting in a file server as a dm-cache writethrough SSD where it provides a decent improvement to common random read IO. Larger/beefier optane drives are a very popular choice for providing SLOG/ZIL functionality to huge ZFS arrays because of their exceedingly low latency for sync writes. However if you're not doing the sync write thing then a decent enterprise SSD will likely be better value (and for my needs at least a decent SATA SSD is nearly indistinguishable from an NVMe device but clearly I'm not bottlenecked on random IO).
"To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."