Month: April 2017

Examining 3D XPoint’s 1,000 Times Endurance Benefit

3D XPoint Endurance GraphicThe Memory Guy, as a regular reader of The SSD Guy’s posts, found an interesting one that compares the endurance of Optane SSDs against that of NAND flash SSDs.  Perhaps this could provide some insight into the Intel & Micron claim that 3D XPoint Memory’s endurance is 1,000 times that of standard NAND flash, shown in the graphic to the left.

The SSD Guy post converts several different measures of SSD endurance against each other: TBW, DWPD, and GB/Day.  Definitions of these terms can be found in that post.

It occurred to me that any of these can be used to roughly gauge the relative endurance of 3D XPoint Memory against that of NAND flash.

Take DWPD for example: Drive Writes per Day.  Not only is this a measure of how many times that an SSD can be over-written every day, but it’s also an indication of the number of times that each memory cell can be overwritten.  If you know this, and if you know how long Continue reading “Examining 3D XPoint’s 1,000 Times Endurance Benefit”

Why Satellites Are Programmed Differently

We Are Doomed!Most engineers never consider the weight of the firmware in their designs.  You probably are saying to yourself: “Firmware doesn’t weigh anything!”  In fact, you are wrong.

There is probably no application to which this is more important than the satellite industry.  With payloads costing $20 – $40 per gram to launch into Earth orbit the weight of firmware becomes an enormously important part of the cost of putting a satellite into orbit.

Amplify this by the fact that a growing number of hardware-based functions are being replaced by their firmware equivalents, and by the fact that modularized firmware is being used to replace smaller hand-tuned subroutines with larger general-purpose routines, and you find that the number of ones and zeros in the average satellite is ballooning at a rate of more than ten times per year.

Is this bad?  In this blog post The Memory Guy will put some numbers around the issue.

Firmware is stored as ones and zeros.  In flash memory or DRAM these ones and zeros are stored either by adding Continue reading “Why Satellites Are Programmed Differently”