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XPoint, 1000x faster than an SSD and on sale next year
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XPoint, 1000x faster than an SSD and on sale next year

ricardoricardo Member
edited July 2015 in General

http://www.micron.com/about/innovations/3d-xpoint-technology

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33675734

Looks like an interesting new piece of tech with an impressive starting point of 16GB of non-volatile storage.

// corrected GB

Comments

  • doghouchdoghouch Member
    edited July 2015

    Does it support my 1998 motherboard?


    (I'mIm joking, it actually seems pretty cool)

  • BruceBruce Member

    Solid state drives - and even slower hard disks - will remain significantly cheaper than 3D XPoint for some time to come, so it makes sense to continue using them to store most files.

  • It says lower latency. Not 1,000 times faster speeds. Huge difference. This will be for stock market and the finance sector, where every ms counts.

  • fair enough, though I'd argue that seek time & latency rather than throughput are the major bottleneck of all non-volatile storage.

    I'm sure those doing micro-transactions in the stock market & forex already have TB's of RAM and won't touch the disk for any decision making.

    Pretty huge deal for anyone doing random small reads, e.g. a database.

  • ricardo said: Pretty huge deal for anyone doing random small reads, e.g. a database.

    Not really, RAM per GB is most likely cheaper than this and still faster (ram access times are in the very low ns area) - For extreme cases like forex there are also specialised PCIe cards that take 4 RAM modules (so up to 128GB) and come with their own BBU for a few days storage after shutdown/crash.

    Thanked by 1deadbeef
  • I'll defer to your hardware experience on that.

    RAM per GB is most likely cheaper

    I got the impression it'll be less, which'll obviously be crucial... though even at comparable prices, the non-volatility of it is a big +

  • SanDisk already makes SSD DDR3 DIMM modules.

    Latency is the best and for speed it's near 1gbit a second but the benefit is pretty much no lagg and directly connected to the processor basically.

  • Steven_F said:

    It says lower latency. Not 1,000 times faster speeds. Huge difference. This will be for stock market and the finance sector, where every ms counts.

    First devices will be using pci-e. No reason to use pci-e if your not seeking to take advantage of the higher bandwidth that interface offers over sata.

  • @Abdussamad said:
    First devices will be using pci-e. No reason to use pci-e if your not seeking to take advantage of the higher bandwidth that interface offers over sata.

    Why use pcie when you can use ddr3

  • @ricardo said:
    Pretty huge deal for anyone doing random small reads, e.g. a database.

    Pretty tiny market really. There are very few applications that would show any tangible improvement over SSDs. More interesting is the much higher (claimed) endurance.

  • ricardoricardo Member
    edited July 2015

    To me it seems game-changing, the more I've read about it.

    Virtually eliminates a requirement for wear-levelling, latency comparable to RAM in the nanoseconds, non-volatile, predicted to be cheaper per GB than SSD in its early stages, and lots of room for scaling it up.

    Its applicable uses are far and wide. The DB example is just a favourite (and a pretty big market actually), as it's something I contend with daily.

  • Even if the speed and latency were the same as NAND, eliminating flash's write wear would be a much-welcomed improvement.

  • Problem is adoption and compatibility. It won't be mainstream for a long while. Just look at M2 and U2 and how it never gets anywhere. It's improved a bit lately but still. SATA3 is still mainstream due to that. It's not even a price issue - just motherboard, drivers, chassis etc supporting it.

  • DBADBA Member

    Too little details to judge if it will pan out in actual systems. Intel has in the past hyped products and technologies that tank rather quickly - just look at the i740 and Larrabee - both were proceeded by claims of a revolutionary new technology but the actual products were not competitive.

  • If only we could use this as RAM...

  • FlamesRunner said: If only we could use this as RAM...

    ... why? DDR3/DDR4 RAM is MUCH faster than this.

  • @concerto49 said:
    Problem is adoption and compatibility. It won't be mainstream for a long while.

    You can say that again. It's much too early to claim any kind of market date. An interesting tech development nonetheless.

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