To fill computers’ voracious appetite for data, Intel and Micron say they’ve developed the first new kind of memory since NAND flash was introduced in 1989.

The new technology, 3D XPoint, is a form of non-volatile memory that’s as much as 1,000 times faster than NAND flash, the companies say. Processors will need access that fast to crunch the data sets for things like 8K gaming, financial fraud detection and real-time disease tracking, according to Intel and Micron. 3D XPoint is due to ship in sample quantities later this year and arrive in products next year.

The companies developed 3D XPoint to complement DRAM and NAND. Far faster than NAND but still an order of magnitude slower than DRAM, it also has a cost per bit that falls in between the two established technologies, said Scott DeBoer, vice president of research & development at Micron. The speed comes in part from the fact that 3D XPoint reads and writes data in very small sizes, similar to DRAM, but it’s 10 times as dense as DRAM, DeBoer said.

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