During its special presentation held today, Intel and Micron have announced the new memory technology called the 3D XPoint. Calling it the first new memory technology since the introduction of NAND back in 1989, the new memory technology promises to be much faster and much more denser compared to NAND.

To be known as the "3D cross-point" memory (3D XPoint), the new memory technology is described by Intel's VP Rob Cooke and Micron president Rob Adams as a high-performance, very dense, non-volatile memory that should be a thousand times faster and a thousand times more durable compared to the currently available flash memory.

When compared to DRAM, 3D XPoint has eight to ten times higher density as the initial 3D XPoint memory chip pack 128Gb per chip with future increase as more layers can be stacked on each chip. This is quite similar to High Bandwidth Memory introduced by Hynix but are quite different when it comes to application.

What makes the 3D XPoint quite special is that we are talking about non-volatile memory, which means that data is not lost when power is cut making it more suitable for permanent storage. While not being as fast as DRAM but offer much higher performance than current NAND flash, Intel and Micron describe the 3D XPoint memory as a medium between those two technologies.




The main design of 3D XPoint memory is a stack of individually accessible cells connected to each other via Cross Point Array Structure, which brings both high performance and high-density bits. Memory cells are accessed and can be read and written by varying the amount of voltage sent to each Selector, while Fast Switching Cell, allows the cell to switch states faster than any existing non-volatile memory technology.

Both Intel and Micron are promising big advancements in high performance computing and are developing 3D XPoint memory and 128Gb / 16GB 3D XPoint memory chips should start sampling later this year.





Source: Intel.com.