“Intel just unleashed a new kind of computer memory it believes will fundamentally change the way the world builds computers,” Cade Metz reports for Wired. “But it won’t tell the world what’s inside.”
“The company calls this new creation 3D XPoint — pronounced ‘three-dee cross-point’ — and this week, after touting the stuff for a year-and-a-half, Intel finally pushed it into the market,” Metz reports. “You can think of the new technology as a computer building block that can serve more than one purpose — a single thing that can replace several others.”
“Certainly, Intel doesn’t want others duplicating the technology, which it developed alongside hardware maker Micron,” Metz reports. “Traditionally, computers stored data in two ways. They stored most of it on hard drives, which could hold large amounts of information for long periods of time, even as machines were powered on and off — and do it pretty cheaply. But computers also used separate memory systems called DRAM to store the data they needed right now. This memory was much faster, but it was also more expensive and held less data. 3D XPoint can replace all those pieces — or so Intel says. ‘“This is truly transformational,’ Intel CEO Brian Krzanich tells WIRED. ‘It allows architects — both at the PC level and the data center level — to rethink how they build the system.’ …According to Intel, it’s about 1,000 times faster than flash and can store about 10 times more data than DRAM.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Price? Licensing or lack thereof?
Those are just two big questions among many.