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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday July 29 2015, @05:36PM
Wat?
Intel has denied that XPoint is a ... memristor
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.
OK, whatever. I'm about to issue a competitor called VLM-emory(tm) that stores ones-n-zeros by changing the electrostatic field between two microscopic parallel plates, but I assure you VLM-emory(tm) isn't a mere dynamic ram cell its totally something new.
My guess is some patent troll has a patent on "using memristors.... on the internet!" and this is their way of avoiding it.
Something interesting to think about is if all the specs are true this will rock for stuff like replacing microcontroller static ram, unless by "lasts hundreds of times longer than NAND flash" they mean in the real world "like 10 or so write cycles, probably, and just like NiCad cells we'll blame the end user when they break" Eventually its going to be cheaper to ship billions of bytes of write-mostly-once flash and a register pointer than to ship sram and its backup batteries in a microcontroller.
You want to think of something weird / mind warping, what happens when immutable/functional programming paradigm hits microcontrollers? Wanna stop wasting battery life changing memory values, well, stop changing them!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:12PM
Having the resistance of something represent 1/0 doesn't necessarily mean it's a memristor.
The definition of a memristor is a bit narrower than that despite the patent trolls trying to get it to cover more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor [wikipedia.org]
And even if it is a memristor I think it's ridiculous if someone could patent and monopolize all memristors. That's as ridiculous as allowing people to patent and monopolize all capacitors.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:25PM
I can assure you, had the capacitor been invented these days, there would be a patent covering all of them. Probably broad enough to also cover rechargeable batteries, if those had not been invented before either.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Francis on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:52PM
Which is why the funding for the USPTO needs to be increased and provided by the federal government. With application fees being nominal and a large tax on sales of patents.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:03PM
Or reduced to zero and the department closed.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Francis on Wednesday July 29 2015, @08:42PM
Which worked fine when most inventions required relatively little in the way of resources to produce. These days, the inventions we really need are the ones that require millions of dollars in funding to properly test.
Take away the USPTO entirely and those innovations won't be coming out of the US at all. I'm all in favor of reform, but burning the building down because the bathroom is dirty doesn't seem terribly practical.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 30 2015, @11:05AM
I'm sure the reason people are willing to pay a premium for Apple stuff instead of Korean or Chinese knockoffs is because of all those patents.
(Score: 2) by Francis on Thursday July 30 2015, @03:47PM
And where, pray tell, did the funding for his research come from? The university doesn't have huge amounts of money to pay for research, a lot of that money comes from private groups that use royalties to fund the research. No company is going to fund research if the competition can steal the work without consequences.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:15PM
Yep, sure looks like dancing around patents to me also. Plus the whole design looks like crossbar switching scheme to me (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbar_switch). Maybe trying to avoid the ancient Bell Labs patents.
And---"...a 128 Gb (16 GB) size." ? Which is it? From the FA it seems they working with 16 and 32 GB capacity.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 3, Informative) by gman003 on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:24PM
128 Gb (gigabits) = 16 GB (gigabytes)
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday July 29 2015, @09:08PM
doh..I didn't see the small "b". My brain only read the Bytes part.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:56PM
and this is their way of avoiding it.
I suspect this is tied to the Chinese company 'we want to buy micron'. Micron is coming back with 'uh double that'.