Al van der Laan

@LLXIR think further... In the next 5 years, the distinction between RAM and Storage as we know it today (and from the past) will completely disappear. Look at what the main storage providers are doing (NetApp, Hitachi, EMC) in their labs. Two years ago we started with all-flash arrays. With unstructured data and "big data" the industry demands higher IOPS and cheaper storage. Customers will demand from their providers that cloud will take on more and more load and yet here we are looking at "little devices" with small footprints.... Somehow someone needs to provide that cloud storage and the lower latencies and power consumptions will need to go with it, therefore NVMe is new today and as you justly observed that SSDs were expensive and only be used for cache in say 2012 it has now become main storage at a price we would never think of. Heck, I remember my first computer was over 5k and only had 32kb of ram and two 5.25 drives.

I think it is a conceptional proof that xpoint (read: Crosspoint) is coming. Today, sure, there is little use for it, once the motherboards have adjusted and the true potential, as lanes and micro connectivity has been adopted by the industry, we will hopefully see this option more as a hybrid nand or supporting it in some way or fashion. Today it is still more like a bridge in between the old and the new. It is only like 7 years in de making, it has only been "known" outside of the patent offices and in the open for the past two, maybe three years. What this device is for is for OEMs to give it a shot, to see how it runs in their hardware and for us enthusiasts to start thinking about the history of a hard disk in a computer. I am looking forward to the first devices that use this devilish fast storage, could even be a phone, or maybe it is already inside the new 2018 iPhone.... who knows!!