Why Micron/Intel's New Cross Point Memory Could Virtually Last Forever

Lucas123 writes: As they announced their new 3D XPoint memory this week, Micron and Intel talked a lot about its performance being 1,000X that of NAND flash, but what they talked less about was how it also has the potential to have 1,000X the endurance of today's most popular non-volatile memories. NAND flash typically can sustain from 3,000 to 10,000 erase-write cycles — more with wear-leveling and ECC. If Micron and Intel's numbers are to be believed, 3D XPoint could exceed one million write cycles. The reason for that endurance involves the material used to create the XPoint architecture, which neither company will disclose. Unlike NAND flash, cross point resistive memory does not use charge trap technology that wears silicon oxide over time or a typical resistive memory filamentary architecture, which creates a statistical variation in how the filaments form each time you program them; that can slow ReRAM's performance and make it harder to scale. Russ Meyer, Micron's director of process integration, said 3D XPoint's architecture doesn't store electrons or use filaments. "The memory element itself is simply moving between two different resistance states," which means there's virtually no wear.

Comments

Re:like the lightbulbs that last virtually forever

[knightghost]

"Crappy power" is normal. Manufacturers need to design for that. How long something lasts in a lab is irrelevant.

I know this is funny to laugh about...

[Anonymous Coward]

But a small boot routine in ROM that erases a range of RAM (persistent or not) isn't that hard to conceptualize. Besides, depending on the type of volatile RAM, it doesn't always come up as all zeros at power-on either... I mean, what do you think happens when you press a reset button? Everything is still in RAM at that point.

What would make things different is a software architecture change that gets rid of the separate permanent storage layer and makes everything RAM-persistent. That would be kinda strange to imagine.

Re: like the lightbulbs that last virtually foreve

[ChrisMaple]

If it was ever true that power cycling is hard on incandescents, it hasn't been for decades. The primary wearout mechanism is evaporation of the filament.