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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.
There's a whole raft of other things to consider before this tech changes the IT world -- how much does it cost, how many separate fabs can produce it so there's no single-point-of-failure that could constrain supply, how much redesign of existing chipsets is required to integrate it into current server/workstation/mobile phone designs, what's the failure rate in service, power dissipation and cooling requirements etc.
Saying that the demo suggests it can be implemented into existing platforms with little difficulty. Of course as Napoleon once said, "There are lies, damned lies and rigged demos." Time will tell.
Using XPoint as a successor to mass storage in my mind is short term thinking. Maybe its a quick way to sell the technology in the near term, but certainly not the best use case.
We should get away from mass storage altogether and use this as replacement for RAM. It will take a rethinking of operating system structure, but promises to provide instant on computers with all programs and data always loaded and ready for immediate access. Database systems would immediately be orders of magnitude faster because all data is always ready for access.
I for one will not miss virtual memory...
Greed is the root of all evil.