Micron Plans To Buy Out Intel's Stake In Flash Memory Joint Venture For $1.5 Billion (thestreet.com) 20
Micron is planning to exercise a $1.5 billion option to buy Intel's 49% stake in the companies' IM Flash Technologies Joint Venture. "The option is exercisable on Jan. 1, 2019, and Micron says the deal will close six to 12 months after," reports TheStreet. From the report: In a statement, Intel suggests the timing of the deal's closing is at its discretion for up to a year after the option is exercised, while indicating it long expected Micron's decision. The companies have already made a pair of announcements this year that between them that signal the end of their age-old R&D partnership for developing non-volatile memory technologies. IMFT owns a manufacturing plant (fab) in Lehi, Utah that both produces NAND flash memory and is for now the sole manufacturer of 3D XPoint (pronounced 3D cross-point), a memory technology that Micron and Intel co-developed and announced to much fanfare in mid-2015. Intel, via its Optane product line, has a head-start on Micron in launching 3D XPoint-based products. However, Micron, via its QuantX brand, plans to launch its own 3D XPoint offerings in late 2019, using a second generation version of the technology.
What's so great about 3D XPoint? In a nutshell, it carves out a middle ground between DRAM (very fast, but not dense, relatively expensive and volatile, or unable to retain its data when power is lost) and NAND (cheap, dense and non-volatile, but relatively slow). Though more expensive than NAND -- particularly in these early days -- and not as fast as DRAM, 3D XPoint is much faster than NAND and much cheaper than DRAM, and like NAND is non-volatile. That opens up a lot of potential applications. Games can get a boost from using 3D XPoint solid-state drives (SSDs) for storage rather than conventional NAND SSDs, as could demanding workstation applications. Within data centers -- probably the largest market for the technology over the next few years -- 3D XPoint could improve the performance of demanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) applications and enable larger deployments of high-speed, in-memory databases than what's possible using DRAM. And in both the PC/workstation and data center markets, 3D XPoint drives can work in tandem with slower types of storage to act as a high-speed cache for important or frequently-accessed data.
What's so great about 3D XPoint? In a nutshell, it carves out a middle ground between DRAM (very fast, but not dense, relatively expensive and volatile, or unable to retain its data when power is lost) and NAND (cheap, dense and non-volatile, but relatively slow). Though more expensive than NAND -- particularly in these early days -- and not as fast as DRAM, 3D XPoint is much faster than NAND and much cheaper than DRAM, and like NAND is non-volatile. That opens up a lot of potential applications. Games can get a boost from using 3D XPoint solid-state drives (SSDs) for storage rather than conventional NAND SSDs, as could demanding workstation applications. Within data centers -- probably the largest market for the technology over the next few years -- 3D XPoint could improve the performance of demanding AI and high-performance computing (HPC) applications and enable larger deployments of high-speed, in-memory databases than what's possible using DRAM. And in both the PC/workstation and data center markets, 3D XPoint drives can work in tandem with slower types of storage to act as a high-speed cache for important or frequently-accessed data.
Does this mean Optane for all vendors? (Score:2)
I would really love to throw a stick of optane in my Ryzen system. I wonder if that patent falls under part of the buyout.
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Rather pointless if you cant utilize it as cache. It's only 16gb sticks. The whole premise behind octane(3Dxpoint) is a buffer between disk and cpu that is closer to ram speed and latency. That's why I asked if the optane IP comes with it. From my understanding is just some firmware/software(haven't really looked).
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Obviously it can't replace ram as its too slow, but for a cache or maybe even larger sizes could be used to hold large data sets or game textures that are used on the system more frequently than say the rest of the OS. Have nvme for your low speed programs(browser, file explorer and wotnot) then have high IO programs (compiler, games, web servers) on the larger optane(3Dxpoint) drive to save time of having to create and copy items into RAM disk. Plus it's NVRAM so it persists.
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To say this memory technology is only interesting in terms of IOPS is thinking highly constrained in terms of today's PC architecture.
Long-term Intel's grand plan involves many gigabytes or even terabytes of such storage actually memory mapped, as actual memory. The idea is access not involving traditional I/O operations at all.
The long game looks changing the architecture of software design, or at least giving software developers a very different set of trade-offs which will allow software to be designed
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Er wut? It really doesn't. A system with a decent SSD and a software solution like StoreMi(Only notable in that it is basically the first good no hassle consumer implementation of its kind) is effectively just as good.
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Bullshit iirc 3D X point has ~50x write endurance? I forget exactly but it's astronomically high or it would never have been thought of as a cache.
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The products I've looked at usually translate to an implied endurance of 20,000 to 30,000 total drive writes (typically over a 5-year life cycle).
For a typical capacity, this translates to a rough maximum write duty cycle around 2% over the life of the drive.
Basically, you can burst 2 GB/s of sequential write traffic for one minute out of every hour, so long as you have 100% read traffic for the other 59 minutes, and not burn out your warranty before the rated five-year window expires.
For a ZFS ZIL cache (w
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It obviously isn't researched and developed enough for every day consumables. but there are already a bunch of optane SSD's in the wild being used today. They're not cheap though. I just would like to see it be able to be used as a caching system for non intel platforms. As I said in an earlier post. It would be nice to have it work even if just like a persistent ram for things with high I/O. Game textures/games would be the main reason for consumers. However I'm sure there are some nerds that could benefit