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I don't understand what this is... but please let it be in the next macbook upgrade/date
 
You're right, but I'm all for faster technology becoming standard! :)

I feel that by 2020, all PCs should come with an SSD standard, even if they're the slower kind. The prices have come down so much over the past decade that we just might get there.

You do realize that the majority of the machines Apple sells today come with flash storage standard, right? Like, vast majority. This is Macrumors.com, not dellrumors.com. heheh as if such a thing ever existed.
 
This means jack and **** without understanding how bus speed improvements will actually allow us to take advantage of such massive improvements at a single system component level.

I should add, not just bus speed improvements, but improvements in CPU speed, and many other components, as well as their busses. A 1000x improvement in storage/memory speed literally gives you nothing, if your system busses and other main system components can't take advantage of it. Systems need to be designed as... systems. Go figure!
 
it will lead to the end of PC companies. With the availability of SSD drives computers very rarely need to be upgraded. I finally upgraded my PC after 10 years.

Reminds me of the lifetime hull warranty on boats. It killed all of the boat companies...

Modern electronics are not made to last ;) . Biggest killer of them is heat, if they can produce computers that do not get damn hot, they will last a lot longer.

Also Apple = PC company.
 
In a single die. So, for example, you can fix 4 or 8 in the space of a standard NAND flash die, depending on it's size.

However, it's not 128 GB, it's 128 Gigabit = 16 Gigabyte.

"Intel and Micron provide several use cases for 3D Xpoint technology, suggesting it will let retailers quickly detect fraud patterns in financial transactions and allow healthcare researchers to process and analyze larger data sets in real time"

why do they need these ******** "use cases"

surely anyone can appreciate if it's 1000x faster, 10x denser AND more durable it's going to make everything better

Mentioning these particular use cases is indeed bizarre. However, there is one bit of information missing, and that's the price.
 
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.
Not "1000x speed" but "up to 1000 times faster". I have the impression that they are capable of reading single bits. An SSD drive will always read 4,096 bytes at a time. So if you want to read a single byte they might be 1,000 times faster because your SSD drive must read another 4,095 bytes. But for reading the whole 4,096 bytes, or a 100 megabyte file, the difference might be a lot smaller or non existing.
 
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"3D Xpoint (pronounced cross point)"

No, it's pronounced "3D X Point". Know what's pronounced "3D Cross Point"? "3D Cross Point". Dunno why that irks me.
 
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So fa
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. :D

So far the dumbest comment I have read in this thread but hey only on page 2 so far.
 
non-volatile? so is this the beginning of the point where "memory" and "space" become the same thing?
 
I should add, not just bus speed improvements, but improvements in CPU speed, and many other components, as well as their busses. A 1000x improvement in storage/memory speed literally gives you nothing, if your system busses and other main system components can't take advantage of it. Systems need to be designed as... systems. Go figure!

Right, but we could still use this "today" assuming it's not incredibly expensive. Imagine if the CPU could just talk to 128 GB of non-volatile RAM as "close" as a CPU's cache is today. If your CPU cache and your main memory and your GPU RAM and your storage are the same super fast block of memory... *daydream* ;)
 
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Do I read it correctly that it's fast enough to replace RAM and it can be used as storage simultaneously? Would this mean that potentially, you could have a computer with 1 TB of storage and no separate RAM, as the processor just accesses the data in storage directly? That would be pretty revolutionary though it sounds a bit too good to be true/affordable.
 
"Intel and Micron say that 3D Xpoint was built to create a non-volatile, high-performance high-capacity storage and memory solution that was also affordable"
But then it says:
"3D Xpoint is designed to complement existing NAND Flash and DRAM options because it will likely be too expensive to serve as a standalone option at launch"
So which one is it? affordable or not?
 
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Intel does some :cool: stuff.


Plus, I like checkerboards, so this would fit right in with ... I can see, future Mac's smart-phones will see this.. unless they have hiccups.
 
so does this replace the ssd and the system memory and make it one solution? is this a shift in hardware architecture? as in making the ssd and system memory the same component on a system board?
It seems to be that way, in theory anyways. I would doubt it would be a significant change in architecture since now days if you have more ram than you can spare you can use it for a ramdisk for fast storage, (that is until you turn off the computer).
 
Interesting, this would seem to make RAM obsolete. Of course there would have to be dedicated non-permanent storage in order to make sure you did not use up all of the disk and have no memory left (like if you have no storage and open a browser, you have to have extra storage to load a web page). But by the time this comes out DRAM and/or SRAM might have reached speeds far exceeding those of this 3D point (ugh, they couldn't think of something a little more catchy?). I guess we will have to wait and see.

I just hope Apple implements this relatively soon like they did with SSDs. If it becomes the next big thing of course.
 
"Intel and Micron provide several use cases for 3D Xpoint technology, suggesting it will let retailers quickly detect fraud patterns in financial transactions and allow healthcare researchers to process and analyze larger data sets in real time"

why do they need these ******** "use cases"

surely anyone can appreciate if it's 1000x faster, 10x denser AND more durable it's going to make everything better
I think those are just there so the less technical news reporters and investors will pay attention. Some people appreciate "way faster", but some people need it spoon-fed to them.
 
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