Researchers Invent a Way to Speed Intel's 3D XPoint Computer Memory (ieee.org)

Memory modules using Intel's 3D XPoint technology are on their way, and researchers in North Carolina have already figured out how to make them better. New submitter mnemotronic writes: At the 45th ICSA (International Symposium on Computer Architecture), a group of researchers from North Carolina State University led by Prof. Yan Solihin proposed a method called lazy consistency to speedup write operations to 3d XPoint memory. XPoint, developed by Intel and Micron, is non-volatile, cheaper and denser than DRAM but requires more power and writing takes longer. The method proposed reduces write overhead times from 9% to 1% by incorporating a checksum to the cache memory system. The researchers were not able to verify their approach on actual XPoint memory, as those products only recently started sampling. They tested using simulations and DRAM and plan to verify when Intel's modules become more widely available.

Comments

Won't Work

[sexconker]

The delay is because XPoint doesn't work. The writes usually take, but sometimes they don't. Intel hasn't figured out why.

They current practice is to verify all the writes and simply redo them if they don't take.
This means you're tying up the the bus, and this is why Intel now recommends dedicating entire memory channels to XPoint instead of mixing and matching with DRAM. If you have XPoint in all of your channels, your latencies go through the roof and your performance tanks.

Wait for generation 3 before considering XPoint NVDIMMs.