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Intel has announced a huge breakthrough in memory technology that they and their partners at Micron were responsible for. The company suggests they’ve created a new non-volatile flash memory technology with memory speeds up to 1,000 times faster than NAND flash.
That’s a huge increase in speed which could bring about many benefits for many different electronics and components. Faster read and write speeds means processors take even less time to carry out their actions as their need to wait on data is drastically reduced. Video game load times could practically be eliminated. Or heck, at the least we’re happy if this technology means it won’t take hours to transfer a large library of music or video.
The technology is being called 3D XPoint, and an individual die of it can hold up to 128Gb of memory, which would be around 16GB per die. It also does so without the need to use electronic transistors, and instead relies on a layered material Intel invented. This not only makes for faster access to memory, but also more reliability and potentially longer lifespan.
Intel says XPoint was the result of over 10 years of research and development, and its status as a reality has been realized as XPoint wafers are currently in early production at their fabrication plan. We’re not sure how long it will take for this technology to be refined and adopted for practical use, but we’re excited. You should be, too.
[via Intel]
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