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Intel has announced at IDF 2015 that it will bring its new 3D Xpoint memory to market side by side year under the brand proper noun Optane. These new SSDs won't but debut in enterprise or business-form hardware every bit we initially expected; Intel is promising to bring them to the consumer market as well. The company is planning to launch hardware in both PCIe-uniform form factors for ultrabook systems and servers, to a DIMM-compatible choice for Xeon systems that offers even greater capacities and lower latency.

The 7x performance merits is from Intel'southward ain tech demo, which showed IOPS (Input/Output Operations per 2d) at a queue depth of one. That's significant, because inflating queue depth is one fashion that marketing teams vastly exaggerate how much throughput an SSD or HDD can really provide. Larger queue depths ways that there are more than outstanding access requests. This allows the drive to adjust its access patterns in a way that volition maximize throughput, though typically at the expense of latency. SSD manufacturers often exam at a queue depth of 32, even though no desktop software will ever reasonably hit that high a queue depth.

Past testing a queue depth of one, Intel is substantially giving find that its performance in this mode is very, very fast. Intel showed multiple demos, as reported by Anandtech, and apparently the Optane drive is v-7x faster than its PCI-Express-based DC P3700 in every benchmark. Of form, what this volition mean for existent-globe scenarios is an entirely different story — in many cases, a 5-7x performance gap may not be very visible, since SSDs remember data speedily enough that improving them further may autumn below the threshold of human perception.

3D Xpoint's improved latency and throughput will matter in enterprise and workstation workloads, but they aren't the merely selling points. Intel is claiming that the new memory type is over i,000x more durable than NAND flash and consumes a fraction of the power. Birthday, these are huge gains.

Nosotros don't expect these products to come up cheap, even if Intel is launching them into consumer markets in 2016. Optane drives volition include a specialized software stack, Intel's custom storage controllers, and the 3D Xpoint memory itself. Even if the memory is cheaper and much faster than NAND flash, Intel and Micron have every reason to milk this particular greenbacks cow while other memory manufacturers scramble to catch upward. Exactly what 3D Xpoint is remains a topic of some debate; Intel has claimed that it'due south not phase change memory. It may be based on ReRAM engineering science, which is currently existence developed past a number of vendors. Most ReRAM built to date has relied on transistors (which 3D Xpoint doesn't do) only it'due south possible to build ReRAM in other ways.

Between the intrinsic costs of launching a make-new applied science and the corporate desire to capture initial profits at a premium, NAND flash is going to have a solid life ahead of it. With Samsung and other companies now pushing upwards to 48 layers of 3D NAND stacked per device, the relatively pocket-size capacity of 3D Xpoint, at 128Gb per chip, volition withal have to improve to lucifer the economics of 3D NAND.