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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 $44-75 to blow on this cache.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Thursday March 30 2017, @03:33PM (1 child)
That really is the only use case that Intel is proposing. In the Tom's Hardware article they have a screencap of the Intel presentation with a pyramid of usecases, and the HDD + Optane is the best improvement.
For most consumer applications I have a hard time identifying how Optane will really benefit, when SSD prices are cheap enough to provide all storage capacity. However I do think that Optane will have a niche in workstation applications that require tons of memory - perhaps video editing.
The biggest question in my mind is where Optane (and Micron's version QuantX when released) is in two years. Will the price drop or the capacities increase? Currently it looks like ~2.3$/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
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.
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