Intel and Micron have come up with new 3D X-Point technology which is 1000 times faster than NAND, which today’s SSDs use, it is denser with the ability to store 128GB on a single wafer and to top it all off it’s cheaper. Apparently it also sports greater endurance and is able to survive tens of millions of writes as opposed to NANDs tens of thousands.
The article indicates that Intel and Micron have already begun production so I suppose that means we can expect to see this hit retail shelves soon?
It will take even longer for them to get to the memory density needed for serious multimedia users (who often have huge repositories of files).
The best case is that you have your programs on this type of drive or even place a swap partition on it in the case you run out of RAM (so your machine doesn’t lock up).
Would be cool if it’s also available in USB-stick format. Of course it wouldn’t be able to use all the speed, but that memory density at lower cost is nice.
Straight to the motherboard in place of SSDs though, I think we’ll be seeing boot times that haven’t been around since the 8-bit era. (They had the advantage of rather simple OS burnt into the ROM at the cost of flexibility.)
Hybrid drives would also be a good use for this I think. Plus with greater density and lower cost those hybrid drives could make use of a greater amount of solid state memory. I imagine we’ll probably see this in thumb drives too, but mobile phones and digital cameras might see some of the biggest benefit here. According to the article posted by wolfmanyoda xpoint will need to use a RAM connector rather than SATA which probably rules out upgrading your current system with one.
