I spent a good chunk today reading up on 3D XPoint technology. It’s basically non-volatile memory based on a phase change technology. Think NAND, except it writes-in-place (no erase needed) and does not have the same degradation issue NAND has (it still does…). This means this memory can be directly addressed, and also offer very low latency and very good performance at low queue depth.

This is because Intel issued a PR for its consumer space, selling 3D XPoint SRT (basically M2 cache drives for consumer grade desktops and maybe laptops). For $77 or whatever you can stick 32GB of fancypants new memory tech into your crap-tier desktop and it will function like a hybrid drive? Uh okay. The only juice I found was that they’ll release a U2 version of this memory and that’ll be worth looking into when the time comes?

Instead, let’s read up on Intel’s roadmap (unlike SLC/MLC NAND, Intel and Micron locked 3D XPoint down) here. Or their 4$/gb enterprise “cache” solution. Or Sammy’s answer as of last year. As you can see this has been playing out for years. A lot of the performance that 3D XPoint brings are going to be “locked” behind the controller scheme, and OS level support. Obviously for hyperscale solutions there’s all kind of juice to be extracted but if we plebs get even non-volatile memory as a result, that would be pretty sweet. Of course even for NVM-based memory (that sounds dumb) to play a revolutionary role there’s so much that has to change…

It’s interesting to see that the heating uptake on NVM directly leads to my investment in NVM (bought a Sammy 950 pro last Christmas) being obsolete. As someone who still owns an Intel X-25m g1 I find it only apropos.