And Micron knows more than anyone but Intel about it--capital costs, yields, directions for improvement, etc. Owning the sole fab for fast NVRAM and trying to g

And Micron knows more than anyone but Intel about it--capital costs, yields, directions for improvement, etc. Owning the sole fab for fast NVRAM and trying to get out suggests things aren't great. I think the slot for a new NVRAM has gotten harder to fill. You almost have to sell it on read latency alone, because throughput (GB/s, parallel IOPS) is already high and scales with RAID, and most folks are either OK with Flash write latency or OK hiding it with (possibly powerloss-protected) DRAM buffers. In a way maybe the easiest pitch is "instead of doubling your RAM, add 3x as much of this stuff," because relatively small caches can show real gains, so there isn't so much pressure on cost/GB. But it still has to be way cheaper than RAM and more performant than 'just' a great SSD. And if the pitch is "replace your whole Flash array with this," beefy boxes tend to have TBs of Flash and most customers will only pay so much for improved latency, which puts a cap on the cost/GB of a commercially viable alternative SSD. Even the fastest Flash SSDs don't seem that popular! A breakthrough could always happen, but I wonder if short-term we're looking more at progress through tweaks to the existing technologies rather than a leap to anything vastly different. If so that's largely because the current tech is pretty good, which is not the worst problem to have.