We managed to grab a few pictures of Micron’s new 3D XPoint-powered QuantX SSD, and the company also provided performance results and endurance information.
via 3D XPoint SSD Pictured, Performance And Endurance Revealed At FMS — News Tom’s Hardware
3D XPoint is an invention of Intel to re-architect NAND based flash memory and make it much higher performance. The goal is to achieve an Non-volatile DIMM memory that could possibly be mixed with RAM modules and be a 2nd tier of memory between RAM and even now current SSDs. The speed increase touted is 1000X faster tha NAND. But from this article you can quickly glean that turning a memory technology into a marketable product comes with many, many compromises. And not least of which is turning 3D Xpoint into an SSD. Apparently this forces many interrupts on the buses read/write as an I/O occurs. Then all that gets stuck behind a SATA-NAND memory controller. Eventually all this needs to be hung off a SATA cable or bridge chip that talks to a CPU or PCIe bus. But hopes are still high for the NVDIMM version which hopefully can get closer to achieving the 1000X faster promises. So little in new announcements have come out regarding NVDIMMs in part due to lawsuits between intellectual property holders and licensees of that property. Some of those cases are ongoing and this announcement points to a possible less litigation filled future for NVDIMMs, I hope.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 