Intel 3D XPoint NV memory is up to 1,000 times faster than NAND

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Intel and Micron have already begun production of this fast, dense, new memory.

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Read more.

Yummy!

Great news! Exciting times :)

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1,000 times faster than NAND

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Does that make it faster or slower than conventional DDR RAM?

Nice!

"More than a decade of research and development"... so presumably the 'affordable' aspect of it will take a similar amount of time to come to fruition as they recoup the costs for the first 5-10 years.

That said, it looks like a very good step toward a sizeable leap in performance across the board. SATA 12Gbps, anyone?

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Originally Posted by Corky34

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1,000 times faster than NAND

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Does that make it faster or slower than conventional DDR RAM?

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DDR3 is only about 50 times faster than most SSD's

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Originally Posted by aniilv

DDR3 is only about 50 times faster than most SSD's

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In that case I hope they develop a volatile version as well (or a means of clearing it on the fly) - I'm not sure people would want their system RAM to be non-volatile - can you imagine how annoying it would be to do something wrong, mess up your machine, and have that mistake be retained across a reboot?

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Originally Posted by Corky34

Does that make it faster or slower than conventional DDR RAM?

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Depends on what NAND they are comparing it to when they use the phrase "up to".

Comparing to the latest consumer SSD at ~500MB/s, your looking at 500GB/s!

DDR3-1600 in dual channel is ~25GB/s

My guess is they are probably comparing it to that lowly 5MB/s stuff. Still, if they hit 5GB/s it will still be quite something and still surpass DDR2 speeds.

My question is in what way will it be 'affordable'?

I don't believe for a moment that cheaper manufacturing will automatically lead to lower ticket prices. Things like the digital distribution of games and software has proved that there is no precedence to show how lower production and distribution costs lead to lower retail prices.

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Originally Posted by Corky34

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1,000 times faster than NAND

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Does that make it faster or slower than conventional DDR RAM?

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Slower.

By "faster" they are talking about lower latency. NAND has latencies in the tens of microseconds. This has latencies in the tens of nanoseconds. DRAM has latencies in the nanoseconds.

Bandwidth is dependent on how wide and fast the connection to this memory is.

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Originally Posted by Corky34

Does that make it faster or slower than conventional DDR RAM?

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If you look at HBM I think you can see that speed of RAM isn't really an issue as you can make it very wide with lots of open pages, the interface is the bottleneck.

Also, the endurance of flash is a bit of an issue for mass storage, which this at three magnitudes better should pretty much eliminate. But with modern flash having around 3000 write cycles, if this takes that to 3M, you could blow that in seconds if you treat it like DRAM!

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

...But with modern flash having around 3000 write cycles, if this takes that to 3M, you could blow that in seconds if you treat it like DRAM!

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That would be more than enough to let this revolutionise hibernation. Imagine the power saving if every time your PC went to screen saver it instead entered full hibernation, yet restarted almost instantly.

This article reminds me of a white paper I saw recently on the next gen of Xeon motherboards beyond socket 2011-3 having the ability to plug storage memory into a spare dimm slot.
This sounds like just the sort of storage memory that such support would be designed for.

Oh goody another paper/lab only memory format to throw on the pile.

Lets face it with the slowdown of the silicon manufacturing process and roadmaps only having a couple of gens left it's going to be a brave memory maker that goes full in on a brand new technology that may only last 5 years in comparison to the 30 years of NAND and 15+ years of DRAM.

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Originally Posted by Kumagawa

Oh goody another paper/lab only memory format to throw on the pile.

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So what you're saying is that they shouldn't try and make a new modern, fast, power saving memory? And simply keep on revamping 30 year old tech? Living in the past, eh?
I think this looks awesome. True SSD replacements (1TB and above) could be the size of Compact Flash. No more worrying about only having 3GB of phone RAM, etc etc future yay. Bring it on I say. These Boffins are awesome.