Last year Intel, 2017, announced a memory based on a new technology, 3D XPoint (read 3D crosspoint), providing a faster, cheaper solution than NAND. Non volatile as DRAM (it does not lose its content when power is off) it seemed as a good replacement for NAND but not for DRAM. What was needed was a way to interface directly to a computer processor, the CPU.
Now Intel has announced the Optane 800p a storage that can power your laptop at least doubling its performance. It is based on the 3D XPoint technology, a way of creating memory cells without using transistors and using a cross matrix to read and write them. This matrix (watch the clip) can consist of several stacked layers, thus increasing storage density (up to 9 times the density of a flash memory).
The downside, for the time being is its cost (price): you get double the performances but you have to pay twice more than normal SSD and this may be a show stopper for quite a while. As for anything in electronics, however, expect their price to come down (although likely at a lower pace than other electronic components given the slower demand in this area -like for the QXD storage cards whose cost has not come down significantly in the last year).
You see, performances keep increasing but the cost is not coming down as we were used to … Moore’s law is no longer ticking as it did till 2014.