Intel is reorganizing its business through the transfer of IM factory shares to Micron and the package sale of its flash memory business to SK Hynix. At least in terms of flash memory and SSD, now only Optane is left.

However, Optane's 3D Xpoint chip is still produced and supplied by the IM factory in Utah, which is relying on Micron. According to Micron’s latest statement, 3D Xpoint is still the company’s focus and business, and has a clear roadmap.

When attending the Bernstein Operational Decision Meeting a few days ago, Micron CFO David Zinsner admitted that almost all of 3D Xpoint’s revenue comes from external memory chips. In other words, the sales of its first and only 3D Xpoint solid state drive X100 have been sluggish, and it has not yet generated meaningful revenue contributions.

Poor sales of the first 3D Xpoint flash memory SSD Micron: Do not give up, will continue to advance

Zinsner admitted that the X100 released in October 2019 has commercial testing ingredients to better understand the market. Looking to the future, Micron still plans to launch more SSDs and memory sticks based on 3D Xpoint chips, which is a bit of a head-on-head with Intel.

Of course, Optane’s success lies in Intel’s ability to specifically optimize its own high-performance computing platform to take advantage of the read/write and latency advantages of 3D Xpoint flash memory. Micron also pointed out this time that it is working closely with many large companies.

It is reported that the sequential read and write speed of the X100 exceeds 9GB/s, and the random read speed under the QD1 queue depth is 2.5 million IOPS with a delay of 8 μs.