Jim,

> One, of course, is persistence.

XPoint memory claims the same persistence characteristics of SSD/NAND Flash, but with a much higher level of endurance.

> The third is whether reliance on RAM forces a very expensive scale up growth path.

That could be a concern.

If we look at current DDR4 16GB ECC DIMM prices ($140 USD ea), given the 10x increase in density. It could be reasonable for 160GB of XPoint memory to be available for $500.

So, spending $3,000 USD for 1TB of XPoint memory would hardly be considered a major impediment for scale-up.

> This is where the distrubuted "atom" architecture of NuoDB and Amorphous came from.

Distributed has its uses, but a single system could be much easier to deploy and manage. What is the ‘cost’ of the distributed coordination? How much time are CPUs actually waiting for data from disk?


Sean