Comment by AnbeSivam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnbeSivam | Hacker News Reader

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From the article -

> They claimed 10x the density of DRAM, it is now 4x

> Latency missed by 100x, yes one hundred times, on their claim of 1000x faster, 10x is now promised

> More troubling is endurance, probably the main selling point of this technology over NAND. Again the claim was a 1000x improvement, Intel delivered 1/333rd of that with 3x the endurance.

From this seminar few months back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXurTRtmfWc ,

I think density can be increased, this is only the initial product,

and latency is contributed more by PCIe/OS/application rather than the underlying 3d-xpoint material. The slides from the article are for the PCIe SSDs, I wonder whether the earlier claimed latency, still holds well with NVRAM.

I wonder why the endurance is so lower than the earlier claims.

Ouch!

10x latency and 3x endurance might normally satisfy the "must be 10x better" criteria to break into an existing market, but with the maturity of flash, and how memory hierarchies can ameliorate useful sets of latency requirements, this could end up being a damp squib instead of the revolution promised. 1000x endurance would have been great, 3x, who will notice?

Not the first time Intel has grossly mismanaged its technology....

"memory hierarchies can ameliorate useful sets of latency requirement"

Not the latency for commits to stable non-volatile storage, unless battery backed RAM is an option.

Or just a big enough capacitor to finish the necessary writes to flash memory. Which as I understand it is one of the things that distinguishes enterprise from consumer flash drives, and one of the reasons I use the slowest, smallest Intel enterprise flash drive for system and /home.

It seems to be a case of transitioning marketing claims from those about the potential of the core underlying technology to more real world scenario benefits. Some of the numbers included latency in the kernel/driver, so they are more focused on actual applications.

It is a bit different to say initial product shipped vs tech potential.. We've been waiting on zen err bulldozer/excavator/piledriver/steamroller for years now, and while mobile and Apus shipped, it has been a fluke in server and desktop markets.

While certainly not breathtaking, it's an initial product on a development path. I was expecting more, but this is still an improvement.

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