It appears to be slower than DRAM, so it's not going to be a sufficient replacement. I also see no indication of how much storage it actually offers. The range between RAM and SSDs isn't that large and I think it's going to be a huge difference whether they can offer 16GB, 32GB or even 64GB at an affordable price.

For a lot of users 16GB might not be worthwhile, 64GB might actually allow some people to not use a SSD at all, so it I think they will have to provide 32GB of storage. That seems obvious enough that the fact it's not stated in the article seems somewhat concerning.

The article specifically puts it at a price point lower than DRAM but higher than flash. It's a passive array which helps make it cheaper than DRAM, but stores only one bit per cell, while modern NAND stores up to 3 bits per cell.

They're promising the first chip to be 128Gb, which is where MLC flash is right now. But their die size looks a lot larger than MLC.

Interesting. At 128GB it's definitely practical to put your system partition and applications on it. If you rely heavily on cloud services that would be more than sufficient for most people and even if it isn't you could add an SSD for music and videos.

If they release it next year and it turns out well, I can certainly see Apple pulling such a move for the MacBook (Air).

128Gb, not 128GB. You still need quite a few chips to build a usefully large drive.

128Gb is only a small factor below state-of-the-art flash chips, if at all. I think 3d NAND drives it up to 384 Gbit/die. Don't know about the die size though.

Quite a few being... 8.

From the article

"Each megabyte of 3D Xpoint will certainly be significantly cheaper than the equivalent amount of Ram. And the new technology has the added advantage of being non-volatile, meaning it does not "forget" information when the power is switched off. But, unfortunately it is still not quite as fast as Ram, and some - but not all - applications need the extra speed the older tech provides."

If what they claim is true, it has the potential to be actually cheaper than both DRAM and NAND, based on the density. The biggest disadvantage at the moment is that is so new that we don't know much.

What can be read from the announcement: it's not as rewritable as DRAM: only up to 1000 more writes than NAND. It's also slower than DRAM. But it seems better than NAND in all aspects.

It's nowhere near as dense as NAND. It's just a bit denser than DRAM.

>It's nowhere near as dense as NAND.

Err, they mention several times the density of NAND.

They claim 10 times the density of DRAM, which falls quite short of the density of NAND.