5 Things to Look for in Persistent Memory this week!

With Persistent Memory Summit coming up this week, I am posting Five items for people to look for in evaluating persistent memory solutions and trends. I will be at the Summit so please feel free to argue with me in person!

• A couple years back at the PM summit, Jim Pappas was adamant on stating that persistent memory is here today, right now, and is not a mythical future item (which it really had been for many years). I love that focus. There is enough real stuff to look at without getting sucked into tomorrow’s possible technology. Review where NVDIMMS, RDMA/NVMoF, Optane/3D XPoint, etc are today and how they are being implemented. We can discuss the mythical future technologies afterward over drinks!
• At Flash memory summit, we provided our definition of persistent memory which references a PM summit paper from 2 years back. The key is that it needs to be persistent, it needs to be accessed like memory and it has to have a reasonable, memory like, latency. I love fast SSDs, but fast SSDs and virtual memory mapping are not persistent memory (IMHO). Look for true PM attributes and applications.
• Intel has put a tremendous amount of work and marketing into Optane DIMMS (Apache Pass, Optane DC persistent memory). Cascade lake has many skus to take advantage of these and Intel has product availability and inventory to support it. Sales of Optane and the use of true PM (app direct mode) is a test case for future market revenue projections. Look for what Intel and their customers are saying about sales and ramp of Optane DC PM. We projected in August 2019 that Intel DC PM sales (DIMMS only) would grow from $700M in 2020 to >$2B in 2024. It FEELS like Intel is slow to meet that revenue projection… but lets see what Intel says when asked (Hint: Earnings announcement is same time)!
• Intel builds on a custom protocol and uses its memory controller to manage persistent memory. The rest of the industry has protocols planned for a more open architecture. NVDIMM-P, CCIX, GenZ, OpenCAPI, CXL are proposed to allow multiple technologies to achieve memory like access and speeds. How are those doing and who is implementing solutions today? Who will win?
• Applications! Everyone is looking for the killer app…. We know of some specific applications of persistent memory (large datasets, quick recovery from reboot, journaling info) but what are the applications that will make is so that 50% of servers MUST have persistent memory? Look for the volumes required and the timing for those.

As you would expect, we have summaries and opinions for most of these topics and more topics like cost, pricing, technology timing and scaling, revenue, etc. Please call or text to discuss.

Mark Webb

www.mkwventures.com