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Intel and its 3D XPoint retentivity accept dominated contempo headlines on NAND flash alternatives, but they've never been the only game in town. Everspin, a company whose technology nosotros've covered several times in the past, announced today that they will bring new MRAM-based drives to market with new partners and commercial relationships.

In theory, as nosotros've discussed earlier, MRAM could represent a so-called 'Holy Grail' — a non-volatile memory solution that is lower power than DRAM while offering improved performance. MRAM is extremely reliable (much more so than NAND flash) and should be faster than NAND flash, but its storage densities are much lower. Today, Everspin's densest chips attain 256Mb per dice. That's not particularly large compared with fifty-fifty planar NAND, and the advent of 3D NAND has sent wink densities soaring.

Everspin's new SSDs will exist marketed under the nvNitro brand name, and will transport in 1GB and 2GB capacities. These minor drives are intended to be used for accelerating storage workloads, not every bit bootable OS drives, and they offer one.5 million IOPS with what Everspin terms "six microsecond end-to-finish latency." They can exist mapped equally either NVMe SSDs or as retention-mapped I/O. The longevity of MRAM means fancy controller schemes to implement vesture leveling or write combining aren't needed, though how much impact this will accept on toll is open up to debate. Anandtech notes that the very high rated performance on these drives compares well against the fastest NAND yous can buy today, though the chapters is evidently much smaller.

nvNITRO-PCIe-Card

Everspin claims it will introduce 4GB – 16GB capacities this year in one role of its press release, just elsewhere refers to "capacity options ranging from 512MB to 8GB throughout the year." Either way, it'southward clear the company wants to make a name for itself in the storage market and is ramping towards the higher capacities that could brand that possible.

What'll exist particularly interesting is to see how these drives stack upwardly against both NAND flash and Intel's 3D XPoint / Optane technology. Optane may well end up being the better comparing indicate — Intel is expected to bring 16GB and 32GB drives to market this year (which ameliorate matches the small capacities of MRAM drives) and the ii non-volatile storage technologies have like claims of high reliability and superior-to-NAND functioning. It may as well prove to be the better price comparison, since the sheer volume of NAND produced each year makes it extremely difficult for challengers to friction match that retentivity's price scaling.

Now read: How practice SSDs work?