Intel and Micron Produce Breakthrough Memory Technology (x1000 Speed)

newsroom.intel.com

20 points·Murkin··7 comments

This could be incredibly interesting in a lot of ways... I wonder how this will affect the likes of database servers that have been highly optimized to treat disk and ram very differently... What kind of boon to memory mapped databases would this be?

I'm guessing that the best initial use cases for this would likely be Amazon, MS, Facebook and Google... I can imagine a server blade that has a low-power CPU, and a TB of XPoint memory with many hundreds to a rack. I would think that on a large scale C* and other bigtable solutions would see incredible gains.

Once other RDBMS are better (de)optimized for such a system, they would see huge gains too.

I don't know that this will leak into personal computing nearly as soon. Low cost is all relative, and even SSDs are still pretty costly when you need several TB of storage compared to HDDs.

Is this similar to HP's memrister effort reported in Wired recently? Sounds like it. "Memory with the density of Flash and speed of RAM."

It's facinating. This technology can replace DRAM and it means that we could switch from GBs of RAM to TBs in one huge step.

They explicitly mention that it CAN'T replace DRAM. It's faster than SSD, but way slower than memory.

They explicitly said that it CAN be used both as a storage and a system memory. Indeed it is slower than DRAM, but the difference is relatively small, DRAM is not even twice as fast, according to the provided data DRAM is only 1.5 times faster.

Does this have any chance in being put into electronics in the next year?

Per this WSJ article http://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-micron-claim-memory-chip-b... there will be production of samples later this year, with general sales starting next year.

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