If we were to believe in marketing material from Intel/Micron, 3D XPoint could almost be the holy grail in storage. It's fast, cheaper than DRAM and non-volatile, making it ideal for performance-hungry applications. Meanwhile Micron has released new information on when first products are going to be launched and there is also an outlook on how the market should develop.

3D XPoint is supposed to perform approximately 1000 times faster than todays NAND flash memory. Since SSDs already were a breakthrough, which helped us moving away from the slow hard drives - also by the same order of magnitude - the same could be expected from 3D XPoint.

Today we're at the point where select customers have received samples to test the new drives in their systems. Apparently those are data center clients or research facilities. According to Micron the 3D XPoint based drives should hit the market in early 2017 and if what Intel is saying is possible, then the first drives could already be available in late 2016.

In the beginning 3D XPoint based storage devices will be present in x86 servers with between two and four CPU sockets and it will take until 2018 until significant single digit market shares are achieved. Until 2022 Micron expects 3D XPoint to cover a lot of ground resulting in an estimated 27% market share.

3D XPoint is certainly an interesting technology. Whether it's the holy grail of storage, well there we're not so sure. It's a great leap forward and the performance improvement over NAND Flash memory is comparable to how much NAND flash is faster than hard drives. Therefore 3D XPoint will definitely help moving data faster to and from the CPU, which in the end will improve the performance of data analysis, data mining, data warehousing, online transaction processing and many other data center application greatly. Apart from that we also curious if this technology is every going to make it into the consumer market or not, but frankly we're not sure.







Source: Micron