... and yet, now we have 10TB hard drives and cheap reliable SSD's on pci. we also have 24 core xeons and x-billion-transistor gpu's. let's not forget fiber at home, 40gig ethernet in the datacenter, and reliable 4G on main st.

clearly, something, somewhere is causing progress to happen, despite your inexplicable inability to see it.

the real problem is people keep making software that gobbles up all these gains.

They explicitly mention that they are going to release it next year. Not exactly when next year but it's clear enough of a statement that it will be a public failure, if they don't come out with it.

I think that's sufficient to not put it into the vaporware category.

Over the years I have come to realize that unless I can buy something in the nearest BestBuy/Amazon, it is vapor. And also, until then, I would know how much cheaper and better performant it actually is.

It's an official press release from Intel and Micron and the release says that they've begun production, not that they just got it working in a lab.

Performance questions are more valid.

On the infographic the subtext of "1000x faster" is "up to 100s of times faster than NAND"

Then it mentions 10x more performance with a PCIe/NVMe interface.

Still all good things, but 1000x is probably more marketing than reality.

Source: http://www.intelsalestraining.com/infographics/memory/3DXPoi...

My guess is that 10x indicates that they've saturated the bandwidth of the PCIe interface.

I think the reason this is so often true, is because with stuff like this, there is not a eureka moment and suddenly you have something 1000x better than what already exists as can sometimes happen in other fields like chemistry, but a technique is developed and then improved over a period of time. The point being, nobody would wait to be 1000x better than the market, as soon as you beat the incumbents by a much lower factor, you will bring your product to market. There is no reason to hold your release because you are only at 10x and next year you will be 50x.

I think you're conflating R&D press releases (which are often vapour) with announcements of actual production, which are few and far between, and almost always pan out.

Second, those 1000x faster and 1000x cheaper. I've been around a few decades, and we DO have 1000x faster and 1000x cheaper stuff now.

CPUs are 1000x the speed of 1980 CPUs.

1GB of RAM would cost you a house back in 1990.

A 1TB disk would cost you half a skyscrapper plus take 2-3 houses to house back in the day.

Not only do we have stuff 1000x faster/cheaper than before, but 3D XPoint is backed by intel and micron, both have colluded for decades on how to develop faster, cheaper, durable storage.

Where did you read "1000x cheaper"? And they say comparing to SSD and HDD it will not be cheaper but faster and comparing to RAM it will be cheaper but not faster.