Memory Matters

At the 2019 Micron Insights the company made some important memory and storage announcements and interesting observations on the growth of data and storage and memory requirements to meet the needs that this growth creates.  

Although Micron had shown 3D XPoint prototypes at several earlier Micron analyst events they announced a PCIe NVMe product that they are currently sampling for high performance enterprise applications that they plan to ship next year.  

The Micron 3D XPoint product is a full-size single port PCIe using 16 PCIe lines that can provide up to 9 GB/s read data rate with 2.5 M IOPs performance.  This is the highest performance SSD on the market today. The picture below shows one of these PCIe NVMe SSDs on display at the Micron event.  I noted that the SSD had a very beefy heat sink above the memory chips and apparently uses a considerable amount of power.  Folks I spoke with indicated that power use for future products would be much less with further developments, including a more efficient ASIC controller.

With Micron producing 3D XPoint products, Intel is no longer alone in providing this phase change memory product to the market.  Intel introduced 3D XPoint NVMe SSD products (that they brand as Optane) in 2017.  In 2018 Intel introduced Optane DIMM products for computer memory channels and began to ramp production of this product in 2019.

In late September, at an Intel Memory and Storage Day briefing in Seoul, Intel presented a slide showing a second generation Optane technology, code-named Barlow Pass, shown below.  It also indicated future directions of Persistent Memory technology beyond Barlow Pass.

With Intel’s continuing commitment to its Optane technology and with Micron’s 3D XPoint product introduction, we have additional evidence in the growth of new persistent memories technologies.  As shown in the figure below from the recent Coughlin Associates and Objective Analysis report, Emerging Memories Ramp Up we expect a significant ramp in 3D XPoint memory shipments in the next decade with projections of total emerging memory revenue of $37 B by 2029.

Micron also had a demonstration of an overclocked DRAM gaming world record of 60,245 millions of transistions per second (MT/s) using liquid nitrogen to cool the chips.  The company  introduced a number of new SSDs.  These are the 7300 NVMe SSDs, the 5300 SATA SSDs and their Crucial X8 Portable SSD.  Details on these products, many using 96-layer flash memory) are given below.

Micron 7300 Series of NVMe™ SSDs

·      Ideal for mainstream NVMe flash storage in data centers across a wide spectrum of virtualized, I/O-sensitive workloads and high throughput environments like AI

·      Uses 96-layer 3D TLC NAND to deliver low power and reduce total cost of ownership for enterprise cloud customers

Micron 5300 Series of SATA SSDs

·      Provides enhanced security and reliability — industry’s first enterprise SATA SSD built on 96-layer 3D TLC NAND

·      Extends industry’s broadest SATA portfolio with best-in-class mean time to failure

Crucial X8 Portable SSD

·      This is Micron’s first consumer portable SSD

·      Fast transfer times and high capacity for consumers storing photos, videos and documents, as well as curating music and video collections

·      Provides gamers quick access to their entire game libraries

Micron’s CEO, Sanjay Mehrotra, said that these are the most transformative years in human history.  With our new technology tools, including hardware and software we are gaining insights and value from data like never before.  This will allow more rapid medical diagnostics and personalized treatments for disease.  It also allows achieving a greater knowledge of the way the universe works.  

As the last keynote speaker (Andreew McAfee)  at the event showed in his presentation, it also has allowed greater efficiencies in the way we do business, that has raised net incomes, created prosperity, lowered the incidence of diseases and childhood deaths while at the same time reducing our use of resources and carbon footprint.  Technology, properly applied, can decouple the growing satisfaction of basic human needs from growth in pollution, resource depletion and carbon generation.