Intel Offers More Insight On Its 3D Memory (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: When Intel and Micron Technology first announced the 3D XPoint memory in July, they promised about 1,000 times the performance of NAND flash, 1,000 times the endurance of NAND flash, and about 10 times the density of DRAM. At OpenWorld last week, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich disclosed a little more information on the new memory, which Intel will sell under the Optane brand, and did a demo on a pair of matching servers running two Oracle benchmarks. One server had Intel's P3700 NAND PCI Express SSD, which is no slouch of a drive. It can perform up to 250,000 IOPS per second. The other was a prototype Optane SSD. The Optane SSD outperformed the P3700 by 4.4 times in IOPS with 6.4 times less latency.

Comments

Re:So which is it?

[ShanghaiBill]

How is this possible? 1 bit DRAM is a single transistor.

No. A DRAM bit is a single transistor plus a capacitor. The capacitor has to be recharged every few milliseconds, which is what makes it "dynamic".

Re:So which is it?

[swb]

If this technology can be adapted to fit into SAS-compatible packaging at MLC/3D NAND pricing this will rock the enterprise storage world for sure.

Entire brands/products in enterprise storage are built around features like caching/tiering that charge you $30k for a little flash and way more than they should for spinning rust under the promise that they'll deliver flash performance for all your workloads, most of the time.

Doing so requires beefy controllers to run elaborate tiering schemes, and along with the sky-high prices for media makes them extremely expensive and extremely profitable.

If (and this is a big if) you can get SLC durability at MLC pricing and simultaneously cut the controller cost (need less compute because you're not bothering with tiering, far less software complexity), suddenly you could have someone selling entry level 24 drive shelves with millions of IOPS and sustained transfers that will melt SAS-12 cables.

Basically it will make sense to quit using rust at all without paying nosebleed pricing at pretty much any scale.

Hardware is rate limiting

[duckintheface]

This comparison says nothing at all about 3DXP except that it is much faster than NAND. With NAND, it is the NAND memory itself that limits the speed. With 3DXP memory, it is the PCIe connection hardware that is the slowest component and therefore rate limiting for the entire retrieval speed.

When Intel/Micron says that the 3DXP is 1000 times faster than NAND, they mean that it has only 1/1000th of the latency. You will never see that speed in an SSD drive. The speed of 3DXP will only be realized as a DIMM module in a custom designed server with all the software modifications optimized for it. 3DXP is revolutionary for in-memory applications running in server farms. And once Intel includes 3DXP on the die with the processor, nothing currently envisioned will be able to compete with it.

BTW, although Intel will have a great advantage using this technology, from what I can tell it was actually Micron that invented (or developed from an early purchased prototype) this memory. I'm still waiting for Micron to start telling us what materials were used and how this memory actually works. That will tell us what its ultimate limits are.