Intel announced Tuesday its 3D XPoint technology and 3D NAND technology, which will help increase memory and storage capabilities in the cloud.
3D XPoint technology will increase memory while reducing cost, performance, and power trade-offs that companies face when they design storage. 3D NAND technology allows for more storage capacity at lower costs.
“These big changes in storage and memory also provide new opportunities for us to advance the computing platform by offering new ways to utilize and optimize memory and storage in the computing platform,” said Rob Crooke, senior vice president and general manager of the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group at Intel. “We view memory and storage with an eye toward synergistic enhancements for both computing architecture and business growth.”
Intel plans to continue updating its technologies to keep up with computer innovation so that the central processing unit (CPU) and memory can be upgraded to decrease data delay.
“With memory and storage inevitably becoming more important to the performance of applications in the connected world, these technologies will open new ways to think about computing for connected ‘things’ and the cloud,” Crooke said. “This is all part of the virtuous cycle of growth where the cloud, the Internet of Things and memory are all bound together by connectivity and enhanced by computing innovations driven by the economics of Moore’s Law.”
Intel uses analytics to keep up with the pace of technology improvements in areas like genome sequencing, predictive factory maintenance, and retail fraud detection. However, the problem Intel wants to tackle is getting data closer to the CPU.
In the past CPU performance has increased and memory capabilities have remained stagnant, leaving the CPU waiting for data from storage. Also, Intel has been hindered by memory capacity and its proximity to storage.
“These two constraints create a data bottleneck,” Crooke said. “The result has been a technology void between [dynamic random-access memory] and hard disk drives. But that is changing as new technologies are meeting the needs of the memory and storage hierarchy.”
Intel is specifically going to be working with game developers to create bigger memory and faster storage to “deliver the gaming experience of a lifetime.” Intel is introducing 3D XPoint technology and 3D NAND technology to solve these problems.
“The immersive, open world of uninterrupted game play they expect has been unachievable with current memory and storage solutions,” Crooke said. “Cinematics, load screens, and level changes are tricks that developers use to mask the current memory size or storage bottleneck.”
Intel will use the increased memory and storage capabilities to analyze more data to help businesses run more efficiently. Facebook and Intel collaborated on Intel Optane technology, which enables faster data movement between the storage device and CPU.
“Intel is driving innovations–using our deep understanding of materials science as well as computer architecture–to grow memory and storage at a much faster rate to virtually eliminate the bottleneck,” Crooke said. “We believe two recent technological inventions–3D XPoint technology and 3D NAND–are key to keeping pace with the combination of growing data and increased computing capability.”
