A Complete Introduction to 3D XPoint Technology

What Is 3D XPoint

The rapid increase of connected devices and digital services generates a large number of new data.

To make the data to be useful, it needs to be stored and analyzed as soon as possible. As the 3D XPoint technology can turn immense amounts of data into valuable information quickly, it is widely used. What is 3D XPoint? The following content will explain it for you.

3D XPoint, a non-volatile memory (NVM) technology, was developed by Intel and Micron Technology. It is a revolutionary breakthrough on the aspect of memory technology. The 3D XPoint Intel is a new class of storage and memory technology, which is faster, denser, and non-volatile.

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The X point memory is also called Intel 3D XPoint. To get more information about 3D XPoint, please keep reading this post of MiniTool.

If you are interested in memory/storage technology, you may also like this: Some Basic Information about Intel Rapid Storage Technology

Main Features of 3D XPoint

The 3D XPoint technology can deliver game-changing performance for large data apps and transactional wordloads because of 1000 times lower latency and exponentially better endurance than NAND.

In addition, 3D memory has the ability to achieve high-speed, large-capacity data storage next to the processor, which brings new possibilities for system architects is exposed to brand-new applications. The initial price of 3D XPoint is cheaper than dynamic random-access memory, but it is more expensive than flash memory. 

As a non-volatile memory, the 3D memory takes advantages over other available RAM and NVRAM on the market. Hence, you can distinguish it from other RAM with ease. Though the first generation of 3D XPoint SSDs are not so outstanding (not very large or fast), the later 3D XPoint SSDs are very fast and even considered as the fast SSDs. The newer 3D XPoint SSD has small-write latency.

Since the memory is inherently fast, skills like read-modify-write and caching applied for improving the performance of conventional SSDs are not needed. What’s more, chipsets with inbuilt support for 3D XPoint like Cascade Lake allow the X point memory to be utilized as a caching or acceleration disk. And this memory is fast enough to be used as non-volatile RAM in a DIMM package as well.

Top recommendation: An Overview of CAS (Column Access Strobe) Latency RAM

The Development of 3D XPoint

The development of 3D XPoint Intel started from about 2012. After developing another non-volatile phase-change memory (PCM), Intel and Micron developed 3D XPoint. A developer of Micron found that 3D XPoint is different from the memory they developed before.

However, 3D memory doesn’t utilize any phase-change or memristor technology according to Intel. And the 3D XPoint is faster and more stable than conventional PCM materials like GST. It is said that 3D XPoint is a little addressable because of electrical resistance material. Moreover, 3D memory shares some similarities with resistive random-access memory.

The 3D XPoint develops based on the changes of bulk resistance and a stackable cross-gridded data access array. The 3D XPoint technology was announced in July 2015, but it was not set available on the open market until April 2017 under the brand names Optane (Intel) and subsequently QuantX (Micron).

Bottom Line

What is 3D XPoint? You may have found the answer in this post. Besides, the article also shows you the main features and evolution of 3D memory. Hope it would be useful for you. Here comes the end of the post.