Analyzing Intel-Micron 3D XPoint: The Next Generation Non-Volatile Memory
by Kristian Vättö, Ian Cutress & Ryan Smith on July 31, 2015 11:00 AM ESTFinal Thoughts
3D XPoint has a lot to chew on. There hasn't been an announcement this big in the memory industry since the invention of NAND in 1989 and while DRAM and NAND have improved and scaled a lot over the decades, 3D XPoint is really a new class of memory. It's fast, durable, scalable and non-volatile, whereas DRAM and NAND each only meet two of these criteria. It fills the niche between DRAM and NAND by taking the best characteristics of both technologies and creating a memory unlike anything we have seen before.
The significance of the announcement isn't just the new memory technology, but that it's actually in production with volume shipments scheduled for next year. Intel and Micron have succeeded in bringing a concept from a lab to an actual fab, which is by far the most difficult part in any new semiconductor technology. Something that works well in a lab may not be mass producible at all, but Intel and Micron made the necessary investments to develop new material compounds and surrounding technologies to turn 3D XPoint into a real product. It will be interesting to see how the other DRAM and NAND vendors respond because the memory industry is one where you don't want your rivals to have something you don't for an extended period of time.
However, it's clear that 3D XPoint isn't a true DRAM or NAND successor and Intel and Micron aren't trying to position it as such. DRAM will still have its market in high performance applications that require the latency and endurance that 3D XPoint can't offer. Our early cost analysis also suggests that 3D XPoint isn't as dense as planar NAND, let alone 3D NAND, but by having the ability to scale both vertically and horizontally 3D XPoint may have the potential to replace 3D NAND in the long run.
Looking further into the future, 3D XPoint isn't the only technology Intel and Micron are cooking. If the two stay on schedule, we should be hearing about their other new memory technology in roughly two years. As 3D XPoint seems to be more suitable as a 3D NAND replacement, the second new technology might be one that is capable of taking DRAM's place in the long run.
All in all, it's impossible to think of all the possible applications that 3D XPoint will have in the future because it's a technology that hasn't existed before. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that 3D XPoint has the potential to change modern computer architectures and the way we see computing, but that transition won't happen overnight and will likely require competing technologies from other vendors to fulfill the demand. What is clear, though, is that Intel and Micron are leading us to a new era of memory and computing next year.
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FunBunny2 - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
If you want to know what's being sold, go back and look up Unity Semiconductor's CMOx tech. Rambus bought them, then Rambus and Micron settled, including a patent sharing arrangement. The last Unity CEO said, just before Rambus bought them, that 2015 was production year. Could be.nwarawa - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
I can't wait for this to be a normal conversation:A:"How much storage do you have?"
B:"256GB"
A:"RAM or on your drive?"
B:"Yes."
ajp_anton - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
10^15 P/E cycles for DRAM? How does this work?, as typical DRAM does on the order of 10^16 cycles in a year. I'm assuming a P/E cycle is the same as a clock cycle because of the constant refreshing, is this wrong?Crazy1 - Saturday, August 1, 2015 - link
I had to look this up, but the DDR3 standard calls for at least 8 refresh commands every 7.8 usec. Rounding down to the nearest 50ns, means to one refresh every 950 ns. When calculated out, that equals roughly 3.32x10^13 cycles/year. That means DDR3 should survive up to 30 years with a 10^15 P/E cycles rating, while never turning off your computer or putting it in hibernate.In a refresh cycle, the information in a cell is read, then rewritten. There is no erase. I'm not sure the speed a typical P/E cycle occurs when erasing and writing new data is required. If it is significantly quicker than 950ns, there may be a decrease in lifespan from 30 years. However, unless you run intensive programs that delete and write new information to all memory cells every 32ns, you are not going to exceed the 10^15 P/E cycles in a year.
TallestJon96 - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
Excellent work. Anandtech always has the best information and reviews, even if they are the last.This is pretty exciting stuff. If storage can become fast enough, then perhaps we will not need memory. Theoretically this would be a massive improvement to efficiency and performance. I would argue that the perfect computer would only have a processor and extremely fast storage. This is not enough to fill the gap, but storage is certainly catching up.
As a gamer, the idea of having my game loaded onto storage that is fast enough to not need to load into the memory is pretty appealing. Zero load time, no texture streaming issues, and potentially larger scale.
I have to wonder about bandwidth with this tech. Latency is clearly between ram and SSDs, but is closer to ram. But I haven't seen any solid bandwidth stats.
Freakie - Friday, July 31, 2015 - link
In the article they mention that gamers already can by-pass slow NAND and HDD speeds by just creating a RAMDisk. If you have 32GB of RAM, you could take 8GB of it for your system memory, turn the other 24GB into a RAM disk, and put all of your game files onto it and then your games will load their resources at the speed of your RAM.And DDR4 is coming down in price very quickly so it isn't such a crazy idea. The cheapest 32GB DDR4 kit I can find is $176 which means 64GB will cost you $350 for games that have 40GB of resources. While not incredibly cheap, it's also not totally unreasonable especially if you're already complaining about SSD's not loading game resources fast enough.
Friendly0Fire - Saturday, August 1, 2015 - link
Sadly, 24GB is a bit short for modern games and 8GB for the OS and the game is also a bit on the low side. Games are finally taking advantage of 64-bit executables (and thus far larger memory cap) and it's showing up as a dramatic increase in asset size, both on disk and in memory.64GB of RAM might get you there, but I think 32's on the short-ish side. 3D XPoint would side-step the issue by providing far more storage than contemporary games would likely need.
lordken - Sunday, August 2, 2015 - link
As said by Friendly0Fir 24GB is unfortunately nothing today, many games today have 20-50GB disk requirments (not sure if devs are plain lazy to optimize or they really need that much space for stuff)Plus dont forget that you need to first fetch data into ramdisk after boot, and wait it to flush it out before shutdown. So personally I would not bother with ramdisks, and probably load times doesnt solely depend on read time from storage only. On some games I didnt seen much difference between HDD and SSD load performance (which shows either bad game engine/coding or some other bottleneck, maybe my CPU).
And not to say leaving only 8GB for OS is really not that great.
JKflipflop98 - Monday, August 3, 2015 - link
Not to mention it's a giant pain in the butt to have to create the ram drive, copy all the files over, and then create all the links needed to actually run the game. By the time you're done futzing around with all that crap, you've cost yourself 10x the time you've saved in loading screens.lordken - Sunday, August 2, 2015 - link
"This is pretty exciting stuff. If storage can become fast enough, then perhaps we will not need memory. "imho this will "never" be true, RAM will always be faster, no matter how much you make storage faster you can still also improve RAM which in turn will always keep ahead of storage. Plus as shown in article it is much closer to CPU and thus better perf/latencies etc.
Maybe in case when Xpoint v3 reach performance level of DDR3/4 then diminishing returns could start to kick in , but still by that time we will probably have DDR5/6 or HBM3. So I think RAM will stick around, even if it could perhaps shift into CPU L4 like cache with HBM for example.