Friday, November 25, 2016

Why Not XPoint for IoT?

Tom's Hardware posted here an excellent survey on the 3D XPoint memory being introduced by Intel and Micron. XPoint is a non-volatile memory that can be written on a bit-by-bit basis, unlike flash. So far, I've seen extensive discussions of how XPoint will be used in servers and desktop/laptop systems but nothing for IoT systems.  Perhaps I'm missing something, but XPoint seems like a good match to IoT. Being able to write one bit at a time allows for very efficient use of the memory and low power overheads for writes. The endurance improvements don't seem to be as high as originally hoped for, but that may not be a big problem for IoT devices that are active only once every few seconds.  XPoint needs a volume driver to reduce costs; why not IoT?

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