3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled
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Re: 3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled
#2[deleted]
Re: 3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled
#3So this is essentially persistent DRAM?
Re: 3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled
#4So this is essentially persistent DRAM?
That's certainly what it sounds like, at least in terms of functionality. Slightly slower, non-volatile RAM.
Re: 3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled
#5I assume there are some other disadvantages besides just a high price compared to either DRAM or SSD storage. What are they?
Re: 3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled
#6I assume there are some other disadvantages besides just a high price compared to either DRAM or SSD storage. What are they?
From the article
"Each megabyte of 3D Xpoint will certainly be significantly cheaper than the equivalent amount of Ram. And the new technology has the added advantage of being non-volatile, meaning it does not "forget" information when the power is switched off. But, unfortunately it is still not quite as fast as Ram, and some - but not all - applications need the extra speed the older tech provides."
Re: 3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled
#7I assume there are some other disadvantages besides just a high price compared to either DRAM or SSD storage. What are they?
If what they claim is true, it has the potential to be actually cheaper than both DRAM and NAND, based on the density. The biggest disadvantage at the moment is that is so new that we don't know much.
What can be read from the announcement: it's not as rewritable as DRAM: only up to 1000 more writes than NAND. It's also slower than DRAM. But it seems better than NAND in all aspects.
Re: 3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled
#8So this is essentially persistent DRAM?
The article mentions:
>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.
Which sounds a lot like memristors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor to me. If it's memristor memory, the main advantages are that it's cheap, uses hugely less power than flash, takes up less space, and has far lower latencies.
We're probably a long ways from replacing DRAM with memristors because it's still much higher latency, but if this stuff scales up well you could do something like put the whole page file on it and get even faster loads than current top of the line SSDs.
Re: 3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled
#9Always the same thing.
>1000X faster, 1000X cheaper!
Then "No, you can't buy one right now, but you will be able to do it "soon". And, no it won't actually be 1000X faster neither 1000X cheaper because blah blah blah..."
Re: 3D Xpoint memory: Faster-than-flash storage unveiled
#10I assume there are some other disadvantages besides just a high price compared to either DRAM or SSD storage. What are they?
It appears to be slower than DRAM, so it's not going to be a sufficient replacement. I also see no indication of how much storage it actually offers. The range between RAM and SSDs isn't that large and I think it's going to be a huge difference whether they can offer 16GB, 32GB or even 64GB at an affordable price.
For a lot of users 16GB might not be worthwhile, 64GB might actually allow some people to not use a SSD at all, so it I think they will have to provide 32GB of storage. That seems obvious enough that the fact it's not stated in the article seems somewhat concerning.