Ann: Q2FY19 Activities Update and Appendix 4C, page-104

Do Some Applications Prefer One Over The Other?

I am often asked which memory technology has the best prospects for success, and which applications are better matched to which technology.  My short reply is that none of these technologies is particularly better suited for an application than is any other, and that cost is the one overriding factor that will determine their success.

Which Will Win?

Objective Analysis expects for the memory that races down the cost curve the fastest will stand the greatest chance of winning the bulk of the market.

Intel is forcing its 3D XPoint Memory down the cost curve by manufacturing significant volumes at a loss.  The company can afford to do this because it believes that 3D XPoint is required to support the company’s higher-performance CPUs.  Any money that Intel loses on 3D XPoint sales will be recovered through the sale of more costly processors.

Other technologies don’t have this advantage, and must be sold at a profit to make any sense.  This is a chicken-and-egg problem: To reach high volumes any emerging memory must sell at competitive prices, but costs will prohibit that until high volumes are reached.

If DRAM and NAND flash do finally hit their scaling limits, then these technologies can become cost competitive after a couple of scaling nodes have been missed, as was shown in Fig. 2, but until that time they will be relegated to those niches that can tolerate their higher costs [cough, 4DS "data centres" "cloud computing"?] in return for some indispensable technical advantage, and those applications are very few, and have very low unit volume requirements.

Source: https://www.electronicdesign.com/embedded-revolution/what-s-difference-between-all-those-emerging-memory-technologies