Going to the Flash Memory Summit tomorrow, what to ask?

[QUIET!]

Personally I want to learn about Samsung SM953 NVMe M.2 flash drives and 3D Crosspoint from Intel/Micron.

Are there any other interesting topics I might want to look in to?

[QUIET!]

I learned a lot but unfortunately not how to get an M.2 NVMe SSD any time soon.

I did see the 2tb SSDs and they are tempting but saddled with the SATA interface.

The motherboard I am looking at has an M.2 slot and also a SATA express port so today I was looking to see if any of the new big SSDs had a SATA express interface. I didn't find any but I did find the Asus Hyper Express kit. It doesn't seem to be available but it does a SSD RAID 0 of two msata or M.2 drives connecting through SATA express.

Looking at the cost of Samsung 850 EVO 1tb msata drives, the price/GB is very competitive. I could buy two and the Asus Hyper Express kit for about the same price as a 2tb drive but probably 50% greater speed.

It is expensive but that is about the fastest silent storage solution I can find with terabyte capacity and commodity SSD price.

[CA_Steve]

Learn anything new about the Intel/Micron Crosspoint memory?

[QUIET!]

There was a discussion by some industry analysts (not Intel or Micron), all conjecture but well informed. Their conclusion is that its a type of phase change memory and the lithography will be expensive. It will also require changes to the memory bus that are proprietary and not in the JEDEC spec so it will be a single source product, not commodity.

The application will be servers at the Purley CPU launch but I imagine a technology like it will reach consumer level some time early next decade.

Its going to be interesting to watch but the trickle down is going to take a while. Any PC built today will be near obsolete before it will be available.

[QUIET!]

Oh, it was also said that the opening keynote at IDF will be one to watch and I heard a rumor that there might be a demo system there too.