Intel and Micron Unveil New Memory Class That's 1,000 Times Faster Than Current Technology

[zxy]

Now think about what this technology will do to networking. I'd stop investing in so-called "Cloud Storage" right NOW. This is going to literally KILL THE CLOUD for significant data storage. Small stuff (bookmarks, saved game progress, etc.) will continue, but few are going to want to backup terabytes of data over a SLOW NETWORK CONNECTION (and make no mistake, even Google Fiber is SLOOOOW compared to what we're talking about here, like conventional hard drive slow, maybe 120MB/sec. That's fast for networking and acceptable for backing up large drives once in awhile (assuming you could actually upload that fast, usually it's just the download rates that are that fast). But SSDs are around 10x faster. Now imagine storage that is 1000x faster. But WAIT, the article seems to be comparing that speed to RAM, not storage! RAM is nearly 20x faster than the fastest SSDs. Thus, if this stuff is 1000x faster than ram, then it might be 20,000 times faster than SSDs!!! No network "CLOUD" connection on Earth can compare to that. I submit that THE CLOUD IS DEAD for big data storage and it doesn't know it yet. Sell stock NOW.

It will certainly shrink the cloud market, but not necessarily kill it. People will still want to backup in case of, say, robbery, or fire.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

It will certainly shrink the cloud market, but not necessarily kill it. People will still want to backup in case of, say, robbery, or fire.

I already mentioned the smaller and more important stuff would still be handy for Cloud Storage. I personally love having games save to Steam. It means I can play on another computer without having to transfer my saves. I suppose some would still store larger things over time if it's transparent to them, but personally I keep a fire safe backup and an offsite backup for those purposes. I'd rather not transfer my personal storage over a network neither for time or security.

 

[oliversl]

This is exiting, let me tell you. I hope one day to have a 10TB SSD on a Mac/PC or a 1 TB iPhone? Maybe in 5 years?

 

[Pman17]

Cool, just need to get Gigabit internet everywhere

 

[Even Longer]

Gaming, simulation, healthcare, engineering, - EVERYTHING is great. But this: "faster interactive social media"??!!!
Bloody Hell, - NO.

 

[Dranix]

It's 128Gbit not GB. So each die hat 16GB.

 

[subsonix]

Lol what? Where are you getting these figures from? Most are around 500 bucks. $1200 is the high end. Where'd you come up with 10-20 grand?

There are high end cards for $100k and up, look at the 10TB card here for example.

http://www.solidstateworks.com/ioDrive-Octal.asp

 

[WardC]

When this product (the 3D XPoint Flash memory disk) initially hits the market, what do you estimate the maximum capacity of one of these drives will be? (like with current ones it was 512GB)...

 

[mko-io]

I just see the rise of erlang. With the insanely large and fast memory technology makes possible, as programmer, they don't need make the trade-off of shared memory space and states, eliminating all the chaos of this complexity and madness(Locks and mutex etc). So Joe Armstrong is right. Write the right program and wait the CPU getting faster, memory getting bigger and DON'T BREAK THE LAE OF PHYSICS

 

[topmounter]

Smells like... the next RAMBUS!!!

#ohjoy

 

[wizard]

Yes ... this is ahead of its time. If it's literally 1000x faster it would be 500GB+/sec ... which is ridiculous.

It well maybe rediculous but time will tell here as there seems to be some Communications issues and maybe even a purposeful attempt to blind the public to what they actually have here. Given that 500Gb (note bits) per second isn't really all that spectacular in high performance Systems.

Speaking of which many things in the high performance world never make it to the consumer world, at least notin their original forms. I honestly think people are getting a little too excited over something that may be a long time coming if it ever gets here. On the other hand I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Apple has been working with samples for some time now.

 

[patent10021]

Yeah I like how all these companies come out with touch all at the same time, new architecture all at the same time etc.

We're just getting what the aliens feed to us 20 years after DARPA has already been using it.

 

[\-V-/]

There are high end cards for $100k and up, look at the 10TB card here for example.

http://www.solidstateworks.com/ioDrive-Octal.asp

Thanks for clarifying. That's ridiculous.

Given that 500Gb (note bits) per second isn't really all that spectacular in high performance Systems.

No, I meant Gigabytes a second, not Gigabits. Current SSDs are around 500 MB (Megabytes) a second read/write ... with PCI-E being faster. They claim 1000x speed to current NAND tech.

 

[\-V-/]

- double post

 

[wizard]

It can go as fast as any bus you can design. In other words, it will scale over time. That is a good thing. Its initial use will be main memory close to the CPU or even mounted right on the same chip (or "up to" 1000x faster at that).

I don't think people really grasp what is going on here. These "up to" speeds are only going to happen when the distance between parts is keep short. This is pretty much the case for all of the new memory technolgies hitting the beach. This is the case already with AMDs new tech that of the Memory Cube group and other new tech, to benefit the storage modules must be very close to the CPU/GPU complex. Expect to see the highest speed Solutions mounted in the same package as the CPU.

The CPU may not even be able to make full use of it for now, but it will mean a solid upgrade path for the future and ram that is as fast as the CPU can handle for the near future and external storage that is as fast as you can design a BUS for (i.e. expect Thunderbolt III to be instantly saturated).

Actually right now with the so called APU Solutions DDR3 simply isn't fast enough. I read somewhere that Intel attributes the vastly improved 3D performance in part to the faster DDR 4 RAM. With AMD's chips it is well known that you need the fastest RAM possible to get decent GPU performance. This should surprise no one as the discreet GPU world has been on the bleeding edge of faster RAM subsystems.

This is the kind of "problem" I actually like to have.

From the little bit I've seen this isn't going to be a RAM replacement. I could be wrong and it is pretty obvious that Intel is keeping the specs or details close to chest.

Even if it's only 128Gbit on a single die, that's still a lot of system memory in today's term (16GB) and multiple dies can be used for larger storage.

Yes very impressive. This could be in hot demand for those higher performance embedded Solutions. if they can stack these dies in the same package it could be even more impressive.

 

[SactoGuy18]

If this new technology lives up to its promises, the result is obvious: imagine 1 to 2 TB of local storage at way faster than SSD speeds. That means on a machine running a full version of Windows 10 or MacOS X, we're talking boot times measured in seconds from start to finish. And given the awesome speed of this new non-volatile memory, it may suddenly make recording cinema-quality 4K video very easy to do.

 

[wizard]

Thanks for clarifying. That's ridiculous.



No, I meant Gigabytes a second, not Gigabits. Current SSDs are around 500 MB (Megabytes) a second read/write ... with PCI-E being faster. They claim 1000x speed to current NAND tech.

1000x faster at what, writes, reads, setup or latency. We don't have all the information yet, they could be comparing it to some USB dongle flash from a decade ago.

 

[cmwade77]

It will certainly shrink the cloud market, but not necessarily kill it. People will still want to backup in case of, say, robbery, or fire.

Not to mention the connivence of being able to have your data literally available on all of your devices without needing to sync it. Even this new technology can't solve that problem.

But this could be huge for cameras, right now with DSLRs, the limiting factor as to how many pictures can be taken in burst mode is the speed of the internal buffer and how fast things can be written to the SD Card. Use this stuff for the internal memory and to replace SD Cards and you solve this problem.

 

[6ft3Giant]

This sounds amazing! Boot time of like .1 second? Unlimited amount of high resolution burst photos? Yes please!
Here's to hoping that this is 1 or 2 years away and not a 6+ years away, and that it will cheap enough for most consumer level products.

 

[Attirex]

Will it make Safari snappier?

 

[Benjamin Frost]

Will it make Safari snappier?

That would be the Golden Chalice of this technology.

 

[Rocketman]

12:52pm Pacific

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...-little-things.1740187/page-106#post-21645350

MROP 3:14pm

The key benefit besides increased I/O speed is the fact it is a unified memory space among what we now have as memory, graphics, and storage. That not only simplifies the parts for manufacturing and makes the end use device smaller and far lower energy consumption, but has the added benefit of higher storage density. This could put an iPhone hardware set in a volume as small as an iPod Nano or Apple Watch, so UI factors would overcome technical size in determining device size.

If your iPhone 8 Watch becomes reality, the large objects like antennas and batteries would be (in) the band.

 

[ChrisA]

Wow, up to 1,000 times faster. That's insane.

No, it's not "insane" it is just that NAND Flash is that slow compared to other types of memory

 

[ChrisA]

With nonvolatile storage as fast as the main RAM inside the computer we are back to Core memory. (How many people here every used a computer that has magnetic core memory? One advantage is that if the power fails, or is turned off the informations remains intact.

So today with a phone of computer going into or out of a deep sleep mode should be nearly instant because the content of RAM need not be saved.

Think how this could be different? If sleep is instant then the computer could sleep for a few milliseconds at a tie between screen updates or between letters as you type. It could have a big effect on power usage.

Generally whenever a new kind of storage is invented we see that it allows computers to do something new

 

[wiz329]

In the sense that it's solid-state, perhaps. But it's more like this will change computing history. Current so-called "SSDs" are likely doomed to total obsolescence within the next few years if this stuff can be made affordable.



Nonsense. This does not make the actual CPU faster or your graphics card faster, except that it can communicate faster. The point is the CPU limits what can be done in the end. You can't create something akin to THE MATRIX just because you have faster memory. You need more CPU and GPU power just for starters. As I've said, this could potentially kill current conventional storage and memory. Storage has always been a bottleneck, though.

I'm curious exactly how more robust this memory is. Are we talking about something that could be trusted for 100+ year storage like manufactured (pitted) music CDs can supposedly survive? One of the limitations of SSDs (and conventional hard drives for that matter) is the mean time to failure. It's why backups are so important (along with malware and fires and other things). You'd never be able to entirely eliminate backups for the latter reasons, but they would be less crucial if failure happened less often.

Now think about what this technology will do to networking. I'd stop investing in so-called "Cloud Storage" right NOW. This is going to literally KILL THE CLOUD for significant data storage. Small stuff (bookmarks, saved game progress, etc.) will continue, but few are going to want to backup terabytes of data over a SLOW NETWORK CONNECTION (and make no mistake, even Google Fiber is SLOOOOW compared to what we're talking about here, like conventional hard drive slow, maybe 120MB/sec. That's fast for networking and acceptable for backing up large drives once in awhile (assuming you could actually upload that fast, usually it's just the download rates that are that fast). But SSDs are around 10x faster. Now imagine storage that is 1000x faster. But WAIT, the article seems to be comparing that speed to RAM, not storage! RAM is nearly 20x faster than the fastest SSDs. Thus, if this stuff is 1000x faster than ram, then it might be 20,000 times faster than SSDs!!! No network "CLOUD" connection on Earth can compare to that. I submit that THE CLOUD IS DEAD for big data storage and it doesn't know it yet. Sell stock NOW.

1000x NAND, not 1000x DRAM.