Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.

Submission Preview

Link to Story

Intel Shows Off a 3D XPoint Backup Device

Accepted submission by takyon at 2016-04-14 22:30:48
Hardware

Post-NAND memory/storage technologies that are almost as fast as DRAM (in terms of latency) but denser and cheaper will be arriving in the coming years. One such technology is Intel's 3D XPoint [soylentnews.org] (also branded as "Optane"). Intel has demonstrated the performance of an Optane device [tomshardware.com] at its IDF 2016 keynote in Shenzhen, China:

In the test, Intel used two computer systems. The first system utilized two Intel SATA SSDs to transfer a movie from the host machine to a Thunderbolt 3-connected device using another Intel SATA SSD. The transfer performance clearly shows a TLC-based SATA device--most likely the company's new SSD 540 or 5400 Series business-class drive. The second computer transferred the same movie file over Thunderbolt 3, but this time the host and destination media were based on Optane memory technology.

On the surface, the 2 GB/s transfer was impressive. The performance was consistent and didn't take much time. Upon closer inspection, though, this was the worst possible demonstration of Optane technology Intel could have shown. The company's own SSD 750 Series could have produced similar results.

The demonstration the world is waiting on involves random performance; it's the one area Optane changes storage for consumers. We won't see Optane technology in a data backup device for a decade or more, but a small amount of Optane to cache TLC NAND will go a long way in improving the user experience. If Intel doesn't arrange a public demonstration, we will have to wait until the second half of 2017 when we get our own Optane devices to run the tests ourselves.

At IDF 2015 in San Francisco Intel displayed a static image of Optane reading random data at 76,000 IOPS using queue depth 1. That is a full 7x improvement over the company's current NVMe-based consumer SSDs.

In other news, Everspin has begun to ship samples [theregister.co.uk] of 256 Mb Magnetoresistive random-access memory (MRAM). Crossbar tried to remind everyone [prnewswire.com] that it still exists. The last time we saw HP/HPE [soylentnews.org], it had seemingly abandoned "memristors" [wikipedia.org] to work on the generically-named [storage-switzerland.com] Storage-Class Memory with SanDisk. Intel could become the first to bring post-NAND memory to the consumer market with XPoint devices with capacities of at least 16-32 GB priced at $2-4/GB [anandtech.com], enough to store an operating system and some applications.


Original Submission