Hewlett-Packard and SanDisk have announced a working partnership where they will jointly develop Storage Class Memory (SCM) products. HP with its Memristor technology and SanDisk with its non-volatile ReRAM memory technology will work together to create Memory-driven Computing solutions.
1,000 times faster, 1,000 times the endurance of current flash storage
The two companies only announced the collaboration yesterday but already have some bold claims for the upcoming technology. Siva Sivaram, Executive VP, Memory Technology, SanDisk said that "Our partnership to collaborate on new SCM technology solutions is expected to revolutionize computing in the years ahead".
In a press release published by HP, the firm predicts that its SCM tech will be "up to 1,000 times faster than flash storage and offer up to 1,000 times more endurance than flash storage. It also is expected to offer significant cost, power, density and persistence improvements over DRAM technologies." The memory is expected to be deployed in tens of terabytes per server node and be used in applications such as in-memory databases, real-time data analytics, transactional and high-performance computing.
Compete head-on with Intel & Micron
As a MarketWatch report on the collaboration comments, the goals laid out by the pair mirror those of Micron and Intel in their announcement of their 3D Xpoint memory technology. Rather than shuttling data around between RAM and storage to get things done, the pairs of rival collaborators want to have all the computer working memory in one fast, affordable, persistent chunk.
In an extension of the above, the HP and Sandisk partnership will result in accelerated development of HP's research project dubbed The Machine. This project aims to "enable a new computing model over the long term," by fusing memory and storage, as part of its computing reinvention plans.
