14 DAY TRIAL // At IDF 2015, Intel decided to demonstrate the Optane, the world's first SSD that works on the much advertised cutting-edge 3D XPoint memory.
Developed jointly by Intel and Micron, Intel repeated that the new type of memory will enable much higher performance than NAND flash does and will be made available to the market in 2016.
No details or specifications have been unveiled by Intel about the new SSD, and any performance numbers have been kept under secrecy by the company. From afar, however, the SSD looked like any other high-end PCI Express SSD. What Intel did care to share with the public was that it features about seven times higher IOPS (input output operations per second) compared to Intel's own professional NAND flash drives. Nothing that we didn't really know when the 3D XPoint was announced.
Apparently, the Optane solid-state drive is based on the 3D XPoint non-volatile memory that gets its own advanced memory controller, interface hardware and software IP. Right now there isn't any sort of physical interface that can fully use the new 3D XPoint at its greatest potential since modern PCI Express 3.0 and modern PCIe NVMe will only offer limited improvements over present-day NAND flash.
3D XPoint, a powerful alternative to DRAM and NAND flash
It seems the new type of memory has eight to ten times greater density than DRAM, and while not being as fast as DRAM memories, it is a thousand times faster than modern-day storage standard. These details seem mind boggling, and although we know just what Intel tells us, without any numbers, performance figures or even storage sizes we can only dream of what Intel and Micron could possibly give us in a year timespan.
The American IT giant said at IDF 2015 that the new high-performance SSDs will hit the market at the start of 2016 while, interestingly, new 3D XPoint memory technology will also be used on a new line of Intel DIMM modules for Intel's next-gen data platforms, most likely the mysterious Purley server system.
