Yeah that is an interesting gamble on the part of Micron (not a bad one at this point). In they are betting xpoint will not deliver the price points needed to compete with DRAM, might as well put a node in the same place with similar latency as xpoint. Intel and Micron were seeing xpoint as a layer in memory. With DRAM being a L4 cache to the data (or some mix). The problem is keeping xpoint prices bellow DRAM yet high enough to keep the thing profitable. Fiberoptic links between the two nodes at this point would probably really complicate things (at this point) as the tech just is not there yet. But if they can get it to work the latency should overcome some of the issues of a secondary node holding shared memory.

All of that because Intel is having trouble moving to 11nm. All of their features were tied to that node process (tick tock). It is why we are seeing Intel back features from the 11nm node back up to 14. As their competitors are not sitting on 2017 tech and milking it. They are moving to the new stuff. xPoint was interesting 5 years ago. When they could make a 128GB stick for half the price of DRAM one. But they did not have the pins on the chip to support the larger workloads. DRAM caught up in size to overcome it. They have them now. But now that config is not as interesting.