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Some of Lenovo's new laptops will ship with Intel's 3D XPoint ("Optane"-branded) SSDs, an alternative to NAND flash and RAM. However, they may not arrive by Q1 2017 and the capacities are still small:
Lenovo's announcement today of a new generation of ThinkPads based on Intel's Kaby Lake platform includes brief but tantalizing mention of Optane, Intel's brand for devices using the 3D XPoint non-volatile memory technology they co-developed with Micron. Lenovo's new ThinkPads and competing high-end Kaby Lake systems will likely be the first appearance of 3D XPoint memory in the consumer PC market.
Several of Lenovo's newly announced ThinkPads will offer 16GB Optane SSDs in M.2 2242 form factor paired with hard drives as an alternative to a using a single NVMe SSD with NAND flash memory (usually TLC NAND, with a portion used as SLC cache). The new Intel Optane devices mentioned by Lenovo are most likely the codenamed Stony Beach NVMe PCIe 3 x2 drives that were featured in roadmap leaked back in July. More recent leaks have indicated that these will be branded as the Intel Optane Memory 8000p series, with a 32GB capacity in addition to the 16GB Lenovo will be using. Since Intel's 3D XPoint memory is being manufactured as a two-layer 128Gb (16GB) die, these Optane products will require just one or two dies and will have no trouble fitting on to a short M.2 2242 card alongside a controller chip.
The new generation of ThinkPads will be hitting the market in January and February 2017, but Lenovo and Intel haven't indicated when the configurations with Optane will be available. Other sources in the industry are telling us that Optane is still suffering from delays, so while we hope to see a working demo at CES, the Optane-equipped notebooks may not actually launch until much later in the year. We also expect the bulk of the initial supply of 3D XPoint memory to go to the enterprise market, just like virtually all of Intel and Micron's 3D MLC NAND output has been used for enterprise SSDs so far.
Phoenix666 points out:
When it ships in March, the T570 will be ready to run Intel's Optane, a new class of memory and storage that promises to be significantly faster than today's SSDs and DRAM.
The T570 is the first laptop announced with support for Optane. Intel has not said when it will ship Optane memory, but the T570 has the hooks to support the technology.
Previously: Intel and Micron Announce 3D XPoint, A New Type of Memory and Storage
False News: Intel Announces "Optane"-Brand 3D XPoint SSDs and DIMMs for 2016
(Score: 1) by BenJeremy on Tuesday January 03 2017, @12:36PM
If it's a standard form-factor and interface, why does some laptop model have to specifically "support" what is essentially a blackbox technology? An M.2 drive is still an M.2 drive. A SATA interface drive is still a SATA interface drive. Outside of things like TRIM and RAID support, which, again, have more to do with the interfacing chip than the memory technology employed, how is it that only this one specific laptop model will support an Optane X-Point SSD?
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 04 2017, @07:10PM
I don't know the details in this case, but I can think of a couple explanations. We saw something similar with 802.11n for example -- all the "pre-n" routers that claimed to support 802.11n before the standard was even finalized. So the router is backwards compatible with a/b/g, it uses the 802.11 standard, it supports 802.11n, but you could still potentially have compatability issues with "pre-n" products from different brands based on what they expected the final spec to contain.
The other possibility is vagueness or variability in the standard itself -- which may be intended to enable this exact thing. You can stick any DDR3 RAM in any DDR3 slot, but we've still got different speeds of DDR3. So if you buy a new high speed stick and your motherboard doesn't support that speed, it might work, but you won't get the full performance. Same with SATA I/II/III, this could essentially be "SATA IV" that doesn't exist yet but still backwards compatible. If this is faster than existing technology that could be the reason -- older devices will still support it over the standard interface, but only at a reduced speed.