"ARLINGTON, Va., USA - MAY 26, 2015 - JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in standards development for the microelectronics industry, has announced that its JC-45 Committee has approved the first standards for support of "œhybrid" DDR4 memory modules which are defined as modules that plug into standard dual in-line memory module (DIMM) sockets and appear like a DDR4 SDRAM to the system controller, yet contain non-volatile (NV) memories such as NAND Flash on the module. These hybrid module families are referred to as Non-Volatile DIMMs, or NVDIMMs, and they may share the memory channel with other standard DDR4 DIMMs. Publication is expected later this year."

"NVDIMMs are in production now by multiple suppliers, with many new product introductions in the coming months."


It's the combination of DRAM and NAND, NVDIMM-N, that's interesting to me, not the pure NAND DIMM, NVDIMM-F. If they mount capacitors on the DIMMs, the data in the DRAM would not be lost during a power loss. It would simply be transferred to the NAND. NAND is much cheaper than DRAM, so there shouldn't be any problems matching every DIMM's entire DRAM with equal amounts of NAND, and at a reasonable price. Problem is, we can never get enough of DRAM. This solution would also mean we could treat RAMdisks as persistent memory.

Here's a PDF from Micron and here's another one from Viking Technology, but the idea of NVDIMMs goes back several years. Maybe now is the right time, but it'll depend on the price.