Intel company management comments raced a strong desire to make a memory-type 3D XPoint one of the growth factors. At least, this year Intel plans to receive up to 10% of revenue from the sale of products based on memory type 3D XPoint. SSDs Optane family will ship in commercial quantities this quarter, customers from a number of manufacturers of server and "cloud" systems will begin to receive the DIMM based 3D XPoint as engineering samples. However, their commercial deliveries will begin only in 2018.
Although Intel recognizes that the deployment of production 3D XPoint requires impressive investments, the company is proud of the fact that it has cost advantage in comparison with competitors. Already, 3D NAND type memory has the advantage of 15%, and second-generation memory will be more profitable to produce.
SSDs Optane family provides an advantage on the level of performance in five to seven times, according to Intel, while having a comparable price of competing solutions. In general, 3D XPoint memory in Intel is one of the major competitive advantages of the company, and to the end of the decade it will occupy one of the top places in the manufacturer's strategy.