Dig a little deeper
Disclaimer: I am CTO at a storage vendor, but have no direct interest in Intel.
The 1000x improvement over flash performance may be valid for raw latency. Read latency of raw flash is about 50us. That of raw XPoint might be about 0.1us. That is a 500x improvement---close enough for Marketing purposes. The reported latency of 7us is likely due to PCI overhead and the current controller and might be avoidable in DIMM form factor.
Re IOPS: note that the reported IOPS of 78,500 is for queue depth of 1 (i.e., with only one IO pending at a time). That is quite good. In general the IOPS reported for flash SSDs (often over 100,000 IOPS) is at high queue depth. Robin Harris gets it in his blog: http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-intels-3d-xpoint-will-change-servers-and-storage/ .
It is plausible that XPoint has the most advantage over flash for low queue depth applications and in DIMM form factor, and that that advantage dimishes at high queue depth.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
