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Comment by sirmike_ | Hacker News Reader

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sirmike_·

Maybe they mean some kind of software ram disk? Whatever it is it sounds like gold plated 90s marketing.

... fog lifts from stage

... a huge screen with flashing, strobing lights emerge with diffused 90s font writing ...

Some kinda music roars and the writing on screen is undiffused instantly revealing

“SOLID SATE DRIVE POWERED VIRTUAL RAM”

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I read that as implying that the SSD is part of the standard memory hierarchy, byte-addressable and not requiring a filesystem. No need to load assets: just create pointers into the SSD's address space. Sort of a modern version of the ROM on an NES cartridge.

I could, of course, be way off.

I believe IO Fusion drives (PCI-Express) had a linux driver that allowed this.

That's very unlikely and probably a bad idea anyway since NAND latency is too high.

Sounds like a perfect application for Micron/Intel's (yet to be widely commercialized) 3D XPoint[1] :) Although I find it highly unlikely a new Xbox would be the place to debut the technology.

Regardless, claimed latency is between DRAM and NAND, so I wonder if it would be performant enough for a gaming use case. To mikeash's point, 3D XPoint is byte-addressable, so perhaps it's possible...

[1] https://www.micron.com/products/advanced-solutions/3d-xpoint...

3D Xpoint has been commercially available for years under the Optane brand name. It's much more expensive than NAND (16 and 32GB NVMe drives available for ~$2/GB) but a smallish amount in the Xbox acting as some sort of cache seems at least semi-plausible and would fit with the "next generation SSD" and "virtual RAM" statements.

3D XPoint would cost more than the price of an Xbox.

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