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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.
Even at 1000x faster, i am not sure its fast enough either. But would we ever want persistent ram for everything? I mean how could we turn it off and turn it on again to fix anything ;)
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
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.
"Crappy power" is normal. Manufacturers need to design for that.
Yeah, see physics doesn't care what you think is "normal". While it's possible to design for a reasonable range of power conditions it is not economically possible to design for all of them. Frankly if your power quality is so poor that they are constantly blowing out light bulbs the answer is to fix the power, not the bulbs. You take the bullets out of the gun rather than insist everyone wear a bullet proof vest.
Is this memory based on silicon, or something else, like GaAs or Germanium or Graphene or something else?
Given that they've released close to zero technical details on how it works, but stated that it's nonvolatile, has 1000x the endurance of NAND flash while being 1000x faster, is cheaper than DRAM, and will be available in 128GBit capacities any minute now, my guess is that it's based on magic.
Given that they've released close to zero technical details on how it works, but stated that it's nonvolatile, has 1000x the endurance of NAND flash while being 1000x faster, is cheaper than DRAM, and will be available in 128GBit capacities any minute now, my guess is that it's based on magic.
Until they release full specs you cannot assume that it's based on magic. I just hope they didn't base it on myth. But we'll see.
Here something I learned a while ago; Speed isn't how fast you do something (it is, but only partially), it is often a measure of whether or not you actually CAN do something.
Here is my story:
In the Mid 90's I ran an ISP. Part of my daily chores was processing logs looking for anomalies, and to gather stats needed to project out the upgrades that are needed. When I started, the logs were small and it took a few minutes to process. As the business grew, the process took longer and longer. It soon took hours to process the logs for the day. It became so problematic, that I just stopped doing them.
But business kept growing, and I needed the stats. So, I bought a new machine. The new machine could process the logs in five minutes, what took hours on the older machine. Mind you, this was one generation difference between the two machines (68040 to PPC 701), but that was all that was needed to show me that speed isn't just how long it takes, sometimes it is whether or not you do the thing you ought to do.
Seeing the price of SSDs and Spinning HD, at their current price points, there is no reason to NOT get the SSD, at whatever cost they are now. Especially for enterprise grade systems that need the IOPS, Even at $1000 for 1 TB SSD is extremely affordable speed, especially when considering you get 90,000 IOPS.
IF we're talking about 1000x faster, the speed is enough to change what we can do.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.