Intel and Micron have made a massive memory chip breakthrough

Intel and Micron have announced a new class of non-volatile memory that claims to offer a breakthrough in memory chips. Known as 3D Xpoint (cross point), production of this memory has already begun and could be heading to laptops, super computers and smartphones in the future. 3D XPoint is targeted to replace non-volatile memory, such as the NAND flash used in the current smartphones, but it works quite differently. Rather than using traditional transistors that have to be accessed in entire rows, XPoint is built from a 3D crosshatch patten, allowing access to individual cells to write or read those all-important 1s and 0s. This is where Intel boasts that 3D XPoint could offer speed improvements of up to 1,000 times compared with current NAND flash. Rather than having to shift, wipe and write data into an entire block of cells, XPoint can access cells individually, which takes less time.