Quantx – The Memory Guy Blog

For more than a year The Memory Guy has been fielding questions about Micron’s QuantX products.

First announced at the 2016 Flash Memory Summit, this brand name has been assigned to Micron SSDs and DIMMs that use the Intel/Micron 3D XPoint Memory. Originally QuantX products were scheduled to ship in 2017, but Micron is currently projecting availability in 2019. My clients wonder why there have been these delays, and why Micron is not more actively marketing this product.

The simple answer is that it doesn’t make financial sense for Micron to ship these products at this time.

Within two weeks of the first announcement of 3D XPoint Memory, at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit, I knew and explained that the technology would take two years or more to reach manufacturing cost parity with DRAM, even though Intel and Micron loudly proclaimed that it was ten times denser than DRAM. This density advantage should eventually allow XPoint manufacturing costs to drop below DRAM costs, but any new technology, and even old technologies that are in low-volume production, suffer a decided scale disadvantage against DRAM, which sells close Continue reading “Where is Micron’s QuantX?”

Micron Technology has introduced a 32GB NVDIMM-N. Perhaps the most important thing about this device is not so much its high density as the fact that it runs at higher bus speeds than competing NVDIMMs, doing 2933 megatransfers per second (MT/s), a speed that Micron representatives tell us is required to support Intel’s Skylake processor.

Up to this point NVDIMM-Ns have been limited to 2400 MT/s, which is fast enough for Broadwell, but which misses the mark for Skylake. Design is tricky even at this slower speed, requiring a number of expensive high-speed multiplexers in the DRAM’s critical speed path.

“Multiplexers?” Yes, NVDIMMs use them, even though no other kind of DIMM does. The Memory Guy can explain why, having just finished a report covering the NVDIMM market and technology.

Here’s a little refresher for those who either don’t remember or never knew that NVDIMM-N requires multiplexers. The NVDIMM-N looks to the system like a standard Continue reading “Micron’s Super-Fast New 32GB NVDIMM”