While it might be a whole year away from commercial availability, Intel and Micron’s joint unveiling of their new 3D XPoint memory has caused quite a stir in the tech world. Promising a new form of transistor-less, non-volatile memory that’s up to 1,000 faster than NAND flash, the 3D XPoint technique has great potential in IoT devices.
With the two companies already developing products based on the new technology, select customers will be able to sample the new memory later this year. Pointing to the increasing strains and demands of the growing volume of data in the world, although you’d be hard pressed to find a period in time when that hasn’t been a constant background concern, the pair are very enthusiastic about their new technology.
The name denotes the stacked nature of the memory cells, which should help reduce the size of devices that opt for the new technology, and XPoint indicates the Cross Point Array Structure. XPoint, according to Intel and Micron, uses perpendicular conductors to connect 128 billion densely packed memory cells.
Each of these cells stores a single bit of data, a binary state, and can be stacked in multiple layers, connected by that cross point architecture. The pair say that future generations will be able to increase the number of layers, which will massively increase the storage capacity, as the first iteration of 3D XPoint achieves 128Gbits (not bytes) across two layers. The two say it is ten times denser than conventional memory.
The technique is particularly noteworthy because it does not use transistors – a core component of nearly all digital computers. Instead, the selectors that read and write to the memory cells access them by varying the voltage sent to each sector of cells. According to Intel and Micron, this increases the capacity, while reducing the cost per GB.
The small cell size and cross point array structure means that the 3D Xpoint approach has very fast read and write times. This is the reason why the pair are claiming that the technology is up to 1,000 times faster than NAND flash, the most common non-volatile memory on the market – and the stuff responsible for the blazing fast speed upgrades that many owners will enjoy when they upgrade from a mechanical hard drive to a shiny new SSD. On that note, the pair say that their new approach is the first new memory category since 1989.
Volatile memory requires a constant power supply to retain its contents, which is why your computer can’t restart to the exact point before its power supply was interrupted – as the contents of the RAM have been dumped, and the operating system has to start from scratch. The contents of your hard drive, solid state drive or peripheral USB drive won’t be lost (unless you were unlucky enough to corrupt a file in the outage), as they are forms of non-volatile memory.
Devices need non-volatile memory to store data. There are, of course, some devices that will not need any form of storage, but for those that do, the new 3D XPoint approach will likely find itself used in end-devices (like those USB drives) and potentially all the way up to the cloud server installations that will power all the computational analysis and storage that will be required to accommodate our increasingly connected world – as part of the growth of the IoT.
Of course, we need to wait for the third-party benchmarks to roll in, and the announcement was noticeably short of details regarding power consumption (the most important requirement for most IoT devices), cost, or lifetime. For further speculation as to what 3D XPoint actually is, EE Times discusses whether it is a type of Resistive RAM (ReRAM).
“For decades, the industry has searched for ways to reduce the lag time between the processor and data to allow much faster analysis,” said Rob Crooke, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group. “This new class of non-volatile memory achieves this goal and brings game-changing performance to memory and storage solutions.”
“One of the most significant hurdles in modern computing is the time it takes the processor to reach data on long-term storage,” said Mark Adams, president of Micron. “This new class of non-volatile memory is a revolutionary technology that allows for quick access to enormous data sets and enables entirely new applications.”