Intel has no plans to sell 3D XPoint chips. A Micron executive said the company is about two months away from announcing its separate plans for selling 3D XPoint products.

“We needed NVMe in part because we knew 3D XPoint was coming,” said Al Fazio, an Intel fellow, speaking of the Intel-led NVMe standard. “If we were still on the old hard-drive interfaces they would be a huge problem, but [NVMe] is still a limiter,” said Fazio who leads Intel’s design work on 3D XPoint.

In an interview with EE Times, CEO Krzanich said Intel has not yet decided whether it will open up its DDR4 extensions for 3D XPoint
 
“We do believe there is an ability to provide a high-speed bus directly to the CPU, but we haven’t defined whether to keep it proprietary or put it in standards bodies,”

In an IDF session, Intel’s Fazio said the first generation 3D XPoint chips will use two vertical decks. He foresees upgrades every 18-24 months with new process nodes to deliver versions with four or eight decks with data retention measured in years.

Like NAND, the technology could pack multiple bits per cell, “but I think it’s a waste of time,” Fazio said. “I worked on the first MLC flash chips, they took ten years [to get to market because] MLC is all about manufacturing margins,” he said.

Just what novel materials are used in 3D XPoint remains the biggest secret, one that has spawned much speculation, all of which so far is wrong, said Fazio.
Krzanich and others insist the chip is not a phase-change memory.

However the memory element is thermally sensitive.