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Intel 3D XPoint... Still Coming Soon

Accepted submission by takyon at 2016-12-30 23:35:15
Hardware

Some of Lenovo's new laptops will ship with Intel's 3D XPoint [anandtech.com] ("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 [anandtech.com] 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.

Previously: Intel and Micron Announce 3D XPoint, A New Type of Memory and Storage [soylentnews.org]
False News: Intel Announces "Optane"-Brand 3D XPoint SSDs and DIMMs for 2016 [soylentnews.org]


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