3DXpoint

Intel and Micron revealed their "3DXpoint" technology, thin on the technical details. It is grids of crossed wires with posts between, two layers of posts, first prototypes 128 Gbits.

My guess, phase change chacogenide glass posts between minimum pitch wires. If the wire pitch is 11 nm wire and 11 nm space, each bit cell is 22nm square, two stacked, so the whole array is 262,144 × 22 nm on a side, or 5.77 mm on a side.

Presume that within 10 years, the wiring pitch will evolve to 10 nm, and the array will evolve to 32 levels of posts. A 3 mm square die will have the same number of cells per layer, 16 times as many bits, totalling 256 Gbytes. If that die was thinned to 20 μm for server sky thinsats, it would weigh perhaps 600 μg, or 2.4 grams per petabyte. 15 exabytes, Bruce Scheier's 2015 estimate for Google's total data storage, would weigh 36 kilograms.

Assume a 450 mm wafer costing $30K. That would hold 15,000 3mm die at 85% yield, $2 per die, $8 per terabyte, $8M per petabyte.

Assume 180 memories per thinsat, with lots of redundancy, yielding 32 TB of error-corrected memory per 5 gram thinsat. About $500 to build and launch (most thinsats will use less memory and will be much cheaper). 2015 Google would fit on half a million thinsats, $250M . One array of 8000 thinsats is a quarter of an exabyte.

From press conf:

3DXpoint (last edited 2015-10-29 18:42:31 by KeithLofstrom)