X-Point – The Memory Guy Blog

Intel’s Optane DIMM Price Model

With Intel’s Cascade Lake rollout last month came with a co-introduction of 3D XPoint Memory in a DIMM form factor, the Optane DIMM that had been promised since the first introduction of 3D XPoint Memory in mid-2015. A lot of benchmarks were provided to make the case for using Optane DIMMs (formally known as the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory), but not much was said about the pricing, except for assertions that significant savings were possible when Optane was used to replace some of the DRAM in a large computing system.

So… How much does it cost? Well certain technical reports in resources like Anandtech probed sales channels to see what they could find, but The Memory Guy learned that the presentations Intel made to the press in advance of the Cascade Lake rollout contained not only prices for the three Optane DIMM densities (128, 256, & 512GB), but also provided the prices of the DRAM DIMMs that they were being compared against. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first let’s wade through the fundamentals of Intel’s Optane pricing strategy to understand why Intel has needs to price it the way that it has.

In Objective Analysis’ report on 3D XPoint Memory, and in several presentations I have Continue reading “Intel’s Optane DIMM Price Model”

Where is Micron’s QuantX?

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?”

Intel Developer Forum – Not Much 3D XPoint Progress

After a big 3D XPoint launch one year ago almost anyone would expect for Intel to have had a lot of exciting new news to share about the technology at last week’s Intel Developer Forum (IDF). Those who were watching for that, though, were in for a disappointment.

For readers who don’t remember, Intel and its partner, chipmaker Micron Technology, announced a new memory layer in July 2015 that would enable in-memory databases to expand well beyond the constraints posed by standard DRAM memory. The pair also boasted the additional benefit of being nonvolatile or persistent – data would not be lost if the power failed. This technology promised to open new horizons in the world of computing.

Intel devoted a lot of effort to promotion and education during the following month’s IDF, and even demonstrated a prototype 3D XPoint SSD that performed seven to eight times as fast as Intel’s highest-performance existing NAND flash SSD – the DC S3700. Although a DIMM form factor was disclosed, no prototypes were on hand. Both were given the brand name “Optane”.

Moving forward one year to the 2016 IDF (the source of this post’s odd graphic), The Memory Guy was shown Continue reading “Intel Developer Forum – Not Much 3D XPoint Progress”

How Many Kinds of Memory Are There?

With Micron & Intel’s July 28 introduction of their new 3D XPoint memory both companies touted that his is the first new memory in a long time, and that the list of prior new memory types is short.

How short is that list? Interestingly, Intel and Micron have different lists. The Micron list, shown in this post’s graphic (click to enlarge), cites seven types: “Ram” (showing a vacuum tube), PROM, SRAM, DRAM, EPROM, NOR flash, and NAND flash. Intel’s list adds magnetic bubble memory, making it eight. (Definitions of these names appear in another Memory Guy blog post.)

The Memory Guy finds both lists puzzling in that they left out a number of important technologies.

For example, why did Intel neglect EEPROM, which is still in widespread use? EEPROMs (or E²PROMs) are not only found in nearly every application that has a serial number (ranging from WiFi routers to credit cards), requires calibration (like blood glucose monitoring strips and printer ink cartridges), or provides operating parameters (i.e. the serial presence detect – SPD – in DRAM DIMMs), but they still ship in the billions of units every year. In its time EEPROM was an important breakthrough. Over the years EEPROM has had a much greater impact than has PROM.

And, given that both companies were willing to include tubes, a non-semiconductor technology, why did both Continue reading “How Many Kinds of Memory Are There?”

Micron/Intel 3D XPoint Raises More Questions than Answers

Micron and Intel hosted an event in San Francisco Tuesday, July 28, to introduce a new memory technology that they have named “3D XPoint”. This technology was explained to be “up to 1,000 times faster, with 1,000 times the endurance of NAND flash” while being significantly cheaper than DRAM.

Some technical details:

3D XPoint is a “Fundamentally Different Technology” than current memory types. It’s an ReRAM that uses material property changes for bit storage where both DRAM and NAND use charge to store a bit
The chip currently stores 128Gb in two stacked planes of 64Gb each, storing a single bit per cell
- Today’s densest production NAND flash chips store 128GB by using MLC, so this chip actually has twice as many bit cells as any production NAND flash
- The companies do not see a clear limit to the number of planes they can stack, but are optimistic about this
The bulk mechanism can be used to store multiple bits on a single cell (MLC)
Today’s chip is made using a 20nm process, but can scale well past that
- There is no clear limit of how far the technology can be scaled
It’s 1,000 times faster than NAND flash and offers 1,000 times NAND’s endurance
It’s 10 times as dense as today’s “Conventional Memory” (which I suppose to be DRAM)
This is not intended to replace either NAND or DRAM, but to coexist as a new memory layer between NAND and DRAM

The companies claim that other Continue reading “Micron/Intel 3D XPoint Raises More Questions than Answers”

What Memory Will Intel’s Purley Platform Use?

There has been quite a lot of interest over the past few days about the apparently-inadvertent disclosure by Intel of its server platform roadmap. Detailed coverage in The Platform showed a couple of slides with key memory information for the upcoming Purley server platform which will support the Xeon “Skylake” processor family. (A review of this post on 7/13/17 revealed that The Platform’s website has disappeared. The above link and the next one no longer work.)

One slide, titled: “Purley: Biggest Platform Advancement Since Nehalem” includes this post’s graphic, which tells of a memory with: “Up to 4x the capacity & lower cost than DRAM, and 500x faster than NAND.”

The Memory Guy puzzled a bit about what this might be. The only memory chip technology today with a cost structure lower than that of DRAM is NAND flash, and there is unlikely to be any technology within the leaked roadmap’s 2015-2017 time span that will change that. MRAM, ReRAM, PCM, FRAM, and other technologies can’t beat DRAM’s cost, and will probably take close to a decade to get to that point.

Since that’s the case, then what is this mystery memory? If we think of Continue reading “What Memory Will Intel’s Purley Platform Use?”