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Roughly xviii months agone, Intel and Micron announced they had developed a new type of memory they dubbed 3DXPoint. While details accept always been scarce on how the NAND wink competitor would perform in the real world, Intel fabricated impressive claims about its reliability, ability consumption, and performance.

Today, Intel is launching its get-go Optane SSD, the DC P4800X. This new bill of fare has a 375GB capacity, with much lower latencies than NAND.

OptaneSpecs

Intel is still playing its cards close to its chest. It doesn't desire to talk well-nigh how, precisely, Optane works or what information technology's made of. Still, we now know a neat bargain more than about where Intel sees this engineering fitting into the data center, likewise as how much it will toll.

In the old days, data was kept in-enshroud as much as possible, in main retention if not, and on a hard drive if in that location was absolutely nowhere else to put it. Hard drives were always the biggest problem with this approach; their latencies are measured in milliseconds and are orders of magnitude college than DRAM, which is significantly worse than CPU enshroud. NAND flash latencies are vastly lower than hard drives, but there's still a significant gap between NAND and DRAM. Intel'southward Optane retention is meant to sit between DRAM and NAND in much the same fashion every bit NAND might sit betwixt DRAM and a conventional difficult drive in a mod organisation.

BareOptane

Intel'due south DC P4800X without its encompass.

Some other advantage of Optane is that it offers the same performance at multiple queue depths. SSDs typically run faster the higher the queue depth, and so does Optane, but the gap isn't nearly so large.

IntelPerfGraph

Intel sees 2 main use-cases for the Optane DC P4800X, both shown below:

OptaneSSDUse

It tin can exist used as a fast storage and cache drive, where its chief purpose is to buffer NAND and offer higher performance, or information technology tin can be deployed as a retentiveness replacement / extension. We've seen some of these approaches before that really utilized NAND flash — and while it may seem counterintuitive to deploy NAND (which is still vastly slower than DRAM), there are workloads that simply don't intendance much about admission speeds. Beingness able to hold jumbo amounts of information in memory for significantly less power can be more important than raw bandwidth.

The price for the 375GB drive, while high, is scarcely stratospheric. A PCIe-based P4800X will sell for $1,520, with a 750GB drive following later this yr. While that's a lot for a conventional high-speed bulldoze, I remember when SSDs toll more than that in terms of $ per GB.

It will exist extremely interesting to see how Optane performs against other SSDs in real-earth workloads. Its latency is excellent, its reliability is outstanding, and if the drive performs as promised, it should offer a notable speed increase compared with PCI Limited-based storage solutions.

Now read: How exercise SSDs work?