Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.
posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 02 2017, @06:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the kaby-lake-not-ricky-lake dept.

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


Original Submission

Related Stories

Intel and Micron Announce 3D XPoint, A New Type of Memory and Storage 17 comments

Intel and Micron have announced a new type of non-volatile memory called "3D XPoint", which they say is 1,000 times faster (in terms of latency) than the NAND flash used in solid-state disks, with 1,000 times the endurance. It also has 10 times the density of DRAM. It is a stackable, 20nm, technology, and is expected to be sold next year in a 128 Gb (16 GB) size:

If all goes to plan, the first products to feature 3D XPoint (pronounced cross-point) will go on sale next year. Its price has yet to be announced. Intel is marketing it as the first new class of "mainstream memory" since 1989. Rather than pitch it as a replacement for either flash storage or Ram (random access memory), the company suggests it will be used alongside them to hold certain data "closer" to a processor so that it can be accessed more quickly than before.

[...] 3D XPoint does away with the need to use the transistors at the heart of Nand chips... By contrast, 3D XPoint works by changing the properties of the material that makes up its memory cells to either having a high resistance to electricity to represent a one or a low resistance to represent a zero. The advantage is that each memory cell can be addressed individually, radically speeding things up. An added benefit is that it should last hundreds of times longer than Nand before becoming unreliable.

It is expected to be more expensive than NAND, cheaper than DRAM, and slower than DRAM. If a 16 GB chip is the minimum XPoint offering, it could be used to store an operating system and certain applications for a substantial speedup compared to SSD storage.

This seems likely to beat similar fast and non-volatile "NAND-killers" to market, such as memristors and Crossbar RRAM. Intel and Micron have worked on phase-change memory (PCM) previously, but Intel has denied that XPoint is a PCM, memristor, or spin-transfer torque based technology. The Platform speculates that the next-generation 100+ petaflops supercomputers will utilize XPoint, along with other applications facing memory bottlenecks such as genomics analysis and gaming. The 16 GB chip is a simple 2-layer stack, compared to 32 layers for Samsung's available V-NAND SSDs, so there is enormous potential for capacity growth.

The technology will be sampling later this year to potential customers. Both Micron and Intel will develop their own 3D XPoint products, and will not be licensing the technology.


Original Submission

Intel Announces "Optane"-Brand 3D XPoint SSDs and DIMMs for 2016 15 comments

Were you concerned that Intel and Micron's new and totally-not-phase-change-memory technology would become vaporware? At the Intel Developer Forum 2015, Intel announced that 3D XPoint based products will be available in 2016 under a new brand name: Optane.

The Optane products will be available in 2016, in both standard SSD (PCIe) form factors for everything from Ultrabooks to servers, and in a DIMM form factor for Xeon systems for even greater bandwidth and lower latencies. As expected, Intel will be providing storage controllers optimized for the 3D XPoint memory, though no further details on that subject matter were provided. This announcement is in-line with Intel and Micron's original 3D XPoint announcement last month, which also announced that 3D XPoint would be out in 2016.

Finally, as part of the Optane announcement, Intel also gave the world's first live 3D XPoint demonstration. In a system with an Optane PCIe SSD, Intel ran a quick set of live IOps benchmarks comparing the Optane SSD to their high-end P3700 SSD. The Optane SSD offered better than 5x the IOps of the P3700 SSD, with that lead growing to more than 7x at a queue depth of 1, a client-like workload where massive arrays of NAND like the P3700 traditionally struggle to achieve maximum performance.


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday January 02 2017, @06:09PM

    by mhajicek (51) on Monday January 02 2017, @06:09PM (#448591)

    It's now Q1 2017.

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @06:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @06:22PM (#448597)

      Next month will also be Q1 2017.

  • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday January 02 2017, @06:22PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Monday January 02 2017, @06:22PM (#448598)

    Lenovo worries me these day; they seem to get getting a little too cuddly with Microsoft. Microsoft is making it hard enough to install Linux on machines without the maker of some of the best development laptops helping them out.

    • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @07:02PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @07:02PM (#448610)

      Yeah heaven forbid there be collusion between the maker of IBM PC's and Microsoft OS's. Where would we be? Oh that's right, we'd have the entire history of personal computing.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @07:06PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @07:06PM (#448611)

      fuck lenovo. spyware installing, MS loving, wwan card whitelisting, linux obstructing scum.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @08:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @08:06PM (#448625)

    leaked back in July. More recent leaks

    "leaked" as in "uploading your software product to TPB so at least _somebody_ would use it".

    They are giving people controlled info so they can make up their minds how they are going to pay for the new tech. As if buying this thing is necessary.

    If it were up to companies, we would be punished for not buying the latest.

  • (Score: 1) by BenJeremy on Tuesday January 03 2017, @12:36PM

    by BenJeremy (6392) on Tuesday January 03 2017, @12:36PM (#448873)

    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

      by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday January 04 2017, @07:10PM (#449480) Journal

      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?

      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.