[News] Micron: 3D XPoint storage is four to five times as expensive as NAND

[StyM]

http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/mic...e-as-nand.html

3D Xpoint (the successor to standard NAND flash) is bound to be the next revelution in storage technology. Intel will call this SSD series the Intel Optane SSD and it will be available in form factors like M.2/NGFF, SATA-Express, PCI-Express (card). Obviously it makes use of the NVMe protocol.

An early prototype has shown already that even in engineering stages it seems to offer up-to 5.5 times the throughput of NAND flash-based DC P3700 series SSDs. Compared to the queue depth of just 32 commands for AHCI NVMe offers command queue depth of a staggering 65,535 commands. Micron is the co-developer of 3D Xpoint so you may expect Crucial branded SSD drives on this technology as well.

Micron now however states that 3D XPoint storage is four to five times as expensive as NAND, which means it'll be a while before it reaches consumer products. They will release it under tha branding QuantX.

3D XPOINT was developed by Intel and Micron and, according to the two manufacturers up-to to a thousand times faster than NAND memory in the long run. It combines the speed of DRAM memory with the storage capacity of flash memory.

A recently published roadmap would show that Intel wants to introduce compatibility with the release of their Kaby Lake processor generation and Optane-SSD's at the end of 2016. Carter expects Optane-SSD from Intel not at the end of this year, but in the first quarter of 2017. Unlike Intel, Micron would like to bring this technology to consumer level in 2.5"-ssd and in M2-SSDs for tablets and laptops.

Carter does not rule out that later on QuantX products appear on mobile devices, according to the Micron CEO that will take some time. The first revenues from sales of 3D XPOINT devices Micron expects the second half of 2017, yet in 2018 would play a greater role, in 2019 Carter is expecting a real breakthrough.

[zalbard]

That's really unfortunate. Hopefully prices drop quickly.

[Levish]

If it is competing mostly with DRAM or a new layer between DRAM and Storage, it could be fairly competitive.
If it is competing with Storage in the 12Gbps SAS and NVMe space, it would probably be DoA or nearly so similar to Intels Discrete GPU in the consumer space (not the datacenter space).

[Metroid]

If it is competing mostly with DRAM or a new layer between DRAM and Storage, it could be fairly competitive.

That is the idea, enthusiast level user ssd cause they will want the speed, value and mainstream levels DRAM cause they will want a cheap DRAM.

[zanzabar]

That's really unfortunate. Hopefully prices drop quickly.

it depends what kind of nand they are comparing it to. it could be 4-5x more than 48 or 64 layer TLC and that would not be too bad. that would put it in line with server grade MLC.