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posted by on Thursday March 30 2017, @12:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the heptane?-octane?-octarine? dept.

Intel has announced two 3D XPoint products positioned as caches for consumer desktops. The M.2 modules store 16 GB for $44 ($2.75/GB) or 32 GB for $75 ($2.34/GB):

Intel just announced two new products that bring Optane technology to the consumer desktop. Optane is loosely defined as the company's products built with 3D XPoint technology, a next generation non-volatile memory structure built from the ground up to reduce latency. The new Optane Memory products will ship in two capacities (16GB and 32GB) and give users access to a whole new performance tier--as long as you have the supporting technology in place, mainly a 200-series chipset.

Pricing for Optane Memory M.2 2280 modules start at just $44 (16GB) and peak at $75 (32GB). The operating system recognizes the new products as addressable storage, just like a regular hard disk drive or solid-state drive. Intel told us that support for the drives as cache starts with the latest 200-series chipset products that feature an additional four PCI Express lanes over the older 100-series chipset.

The magic happens when you enable a "modified" version of Smart Response Technology and build a cache array with the Optane Memory standing invisibly in front of an HDD or SSD. The Optane Memory becomes a cache device that accelerates I/O for data retained in its memory structure from previous I/O requests.

Compare with the previous story about a 3D XPoint SSD for the enterprise: First Intel Optane 3D XPoint SSD Released: 375 GB for $1520. Many more of us could find $44-75 to blow on this cache.


Original Submission

Related Stories

First Intel Optane 3D XPoint SSD Released: 375 GB for $1520 3 comments

Intel has released a 3D XPoint drive. It's not vaporware!

The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X has a write endurance rating of 30 Drive Writes Per Day, and Intel is hopeful that future products can offer even higher ratings once 3D XPoint memory has more broadly proven its reliability. Today's limited release 375GB models have a three year warranty for a total write endurance rating of 12.3 PB, and once the product line is expanded to broad availability of the full range of capacities in the second half of this year the warranty period will be five years.

Intel is offering the 375GB P4800X in PCIe add-in card form factor with a MSRP of $1520 starting today with a limited early-ship program. In Q2 a 375GB U.2 model will ship, as well as a 750GB add-in card. In the second half of the year the rest of the capacity and form factor options will be available, but prices and exact release dates for those models have not been announced. At just over $4/GB the P4800X seems to fall much closer to DRAM than NAND in price, though to be fair the enterprise SSDs it will compete against are all well over $1/GB and the largest DDR4 DIMMs are around $10/GB.

The product is not as fast at sequential transfers as some SSDs:

The raw specs for the P4800X leaked in February. To summarize: it's a datacenter-oriented part, built for applications with high read/write loads, looking for low latency. The sequential transfer rates of 2400MB/s read, 2000MB/s write, are good, but some of the fastest NAND flash can pull slightly ahead. Where the P4800X excels is its ability to sustain high I/O loads, courtesy of those low latencies.

[...] The P4800X can do 550,000 read IOPS and 500,000 write IOPS, but critically, Intel says it achieves this even at low queue depths. The spec sheet figure has a queue depth of 16, and the company says that a queue depth of about 8 tends to be about the limit seen in the real world. Moreover, Intel says that the latency of each I/O operation remains low even under heavy load. 99.999 percent of operations have a read or write latency below 60 or 100 microseconds (respectively) with a queue depth of 1, rising to 150 or 200 microseconds with a queue depth of 16. Under a comparable load, Intel's own P3700 NAND SSD can only serve 99 percent of operations with a latency below about 2,800 microseconds. Likewise, under sustained write workloads, the P4800X retains its low latency for reads, whereas the read latency of the P3700 NAND steadily deteriorates as the write bandwidth increases.


Original Submission

Intel Announces the Optane SSD 900P: Cheaper 3D XPoint for Desktops 10 comments

Intel has announced new 3D XPoint "Optane" solid state drives at two capacities:

The Intel Optane SSD 900P will come to market in two capacity sizes, 280GB and 480GB. The series uses two form factors, 2.5" U.2 and half-height, half-length add-in card (AIC). This will start to get confusing so look closely. The 280GB will have two 2.5" models on launch day. One comes with a standard U.2 cable and the second comes with an M.2 to U.2 adapter cable. The 480GB will not ship in a 2.5" form factor until a later date. It will ship in the add-in card form factor starting today.

Regardless of the form factor or capacity size, all Optane SSD 900P drives deliver up to 2,500 MBps sequential read and 2,000 MBps sequential write performance. This is lower than some of the other high-performance NVMe SSDs shipping today, but we will address that in the next section. The drives also deliver up to 550,000 random read and 500,000 random write IOPS performance. This is class leading performance, but there is more to the story.

3D XPoint memory performance is closer to the speed of DRAM than NAND used in SSDs. SSD marketing numbers show maximum performance that comes only at high queue depths. Most of us rarely surpass queue depth 4 and the faster the storage, the less likely you are to even build data requests. This memory addresses the problem with performance at usable workloads.

In the chart [here] we have the three fastest Intel consumer storage products from different market segments: SATA SSD, NVMe SSD, and Optane NVMe SSD. We've also added the new Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB, the fastest consumer hard disk drive shipping today.

Pricing is $390 for 280 GB, and $600 for 480 GB. That's $1.25/GB for the larger drive, compared to $2.34/GB for the 32 GB Optane Memory M.2 2280 and the launch price of $4.05/GB for the 375 GB Optane SSD DC P4800X (Reviewed here).

3D XPoint is a non-volatile memory/storage technology.

Previously: First Intel Optane 3D XPoint SSD Released: 375 GB for $1520
Intel Announces Optane 16 GB and 32 GB M.2 Modules
Intel Announces "Ruler" Form Factor for Server SSDs


Original Submission

Intel Unveils 58 GB and 118 GB Optane SSDs 10 comments

The Intel Optane SSD 800p (58GB & 118GB) Review: Almost The Right Size

Intel's first Optane products hit the market almost a year ago, putting the much-awaited 3D XPoint memory in the hands of consumers. Today, Intel broadens that family with the Optane SSD 800p, pushing the Optane brand closer to the mainstream.

The new Optane SSD 800p is an M.2 NVMe SSD using Intel's 3D XPoint memory instead of flash memory. The 800p is based on the same hardware platform as last year's Optane Memory M.2 drive, which was intended primarily for caching purposes (but could also be used as a boot drive with a sufficiently small operating system). That means the 800p uses a PCIe 3 x2 link and Intel's first-generation 3D XPoint memory—but more of it, with usable capacities of 58GB and 118GB compared to just 16GB and 32GB from last year's Optane Memory. The PCB layout has been tweaked and the sticker on the drive no longer has a foil layer to act as a heatspreader, but the most significant design changes are to the drive firmware, which now supports power management including a low power idle state.

Prices are $129 and $199.

Also at ZDNet.

Previously: First Intel Optane 3D XPoint SSD Released: 375 GB for $1520
Intel Announces Optane 16 GB and 32 GB M.2 Modules
Intel Announces the Optane SSD 900P: Cheaper 3D XPoint for Desktops


Original Submission

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @01:15PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @01:15PM (#486449)

    Goes good with the intel Management Engine that allows the rulers to exfiltrate anything on your computer.
    This helps them find mmmaaalleeesss that like young girls.

  • (Score: 1) by snmygos on Thursday March 30 2017, @01:48PM (2 children)

    by snmygos (6274) on Thursday March 30 2017, @01:48PM (#486459)

    I would use a 32 GB Optane even to replace a SSD if it is very fast, with a HD for the data.

    • (Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday March 30 2017, @03:33PM (1 child)

      by richtopia (3160) on Thursday March 30 2017, @03:33PM (#486515) Homepage Journal

      That really is the only use case that Intel is proposing. In the Tom's Hardware article they have a screencap of the Intel presentation with a pyramid of usecases, and the HDD + Optane is the best improvement.

      For most consumer applications I have a hard time identifying how Optane will really benefit, when SSD prices are cheap enough to provide all storage capacity. However I do think that Optane will have a niche in workstation applications that require tons of memory - perhaps video editing.

      The biggest question in my mind is where Optane (and Micron's version QuantX when released) is in two years. Will the price drop or the capacities increase? Currently it looks like ~2.3$/GB for the consumer M.2 modules or 4$/GB for the enterprise card. With SSD's available at 0.25$/GB Optane is roughly an order of magnitude more expensive. I'm not sure what price point would be needed to expand the use case, and for a very new process there may be lots of room for improvement and learning in the near future.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday March 30 2017, @04:51PM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday March 30 2017, @04:51PM (#486588) Journal

        I say let the SSD kill HDDs for everything but the bulkiest storage (and then you have tape as an option there as well), and let XPoint/QuantX take on DRAM. If the density and $/GB outpaces DRAM for a bit, and you use it in the right way keeping endurance in mind, you don't need as much DRAM.

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @02:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @02:05PM (#486461)

    Will it support JTAG? [fmad.io], always good to have when the SSD inevitable sucks all data into a black hole.

    "Secure Erase" ATA-8 command in parallel seems to brick some drives. Who knows what other commands that may also be affected.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday March 30 2017, @04:18PM (5 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Thursday March 30 2017, @04:18PM (#486559)

    > Many more of us could find $44-75 to blow on this cache.

    Except that most of us would need a new PCB and processor that support it... Which we don't currently have because Intel hasn't given us good reasons to upgrade in years, and we're looking at new shiny affordable Zen.
    Not so cheap, suddenly...

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:37PM (4 children)

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday March 30 2017, @06:37PM (#486674) Journal

      Spend the money on standard DRAM (used as cache) and then hard-disc. It's mainly the booting that is slow which is a lesser problem with operating systems designed for always on.

      • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday March 31 2017, @10:02AM (3 children)

        by TheRaven (270) on Friday March 31 2017, @10:02AM (#487010) Journal
        A lot of the low-power boards that you use in a home NAS are limited to 8 or 16GB of RAM. A cheap way of adding 32GB of very fast storage for L2 ARC would be quite nice for these.
        --
        sudo mod me up
        • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday March 31 2017, @10:11AM (2 children)

          by kaszz (4211) on Friday March 31 2017, @10:11AM (#487014) Journal

          Solution, buy a computer that can take more DRAM?

          There's also devices that takes standard DRAM and present it as a real harddisk with battery backup. Dunno if it's cheaper than flashdisk (SSD).

          • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday March 31 2017, @11:44AM (1 child)

            by TheRaven (270) on Friday March 31 2017, @11:44AM (#487038) Journal
            Buying a computer that can take more DRAM isn't usually an option for a consumer NAS, because you're limited by size and power consumption. It's fine if you're building a bit SAN device, but for something always on in a living room you want a low-power CPU and a mini-ITX board.
            --
            sudo mod me up
            • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday April 01 2017, @02:10PM

              by kaszz (4211) on Saturday April 01 2017, @02:10PM (#487615) Journal

              Perhaps DRAM--SATA modules would be an option?

              (can be configured as swap etc to be used as memory)

  • (Score: -1, Spam) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @04:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @04:50PM (#486587)

    Goes good with the intel Management Engine that allows the rulers to exfiltrate anything on your computer.
    This helps them find mmmaaalleeesss that like young girls

  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by xpda on Thursday March 30 2017, @09:39PM

    by xpda (5991) on Thursday March 30 2017, @09:39PM (#486758) Homepage

    Please! I give up! I surrender! No more phys.org links!!!!

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