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Roughly 18 months ago, Intel and Micron announced they had adult a new type of memory they dubbed 3DXPoint. While details accept always been scarce on how the NAND flash competitor would perform in the real world, Intel made impressive claims well-nigh its reliability, ability consumption, and performance.

Today, Intel is launching its first Optane SSD, the DC P4800X. This new carte has a 375GB capacity, with much lower latencies than NAND.

OptaneSpecs

Intel is notwithstanding playing its cards close to its chest. It doesn't want to talk about how, precisely, Optane works or what it'southward made of. Still, we at present know a great bargain more well-nigh where Intel sees this technology plumbing fixtures into the data center, too as how much it will toll.

In the old days, information was kept in-enshroud equally much equally possible, in main memory if not, and on a difficult drive if there was absolutely nowhere else to put it. Hard drives were always the biggest trouble with this approach; their latencies are measured in milliseconds and are orders of magnitude higher than DRAM, which is significantly worse than CPU cache. NAND wink latencies are vastly lower than difficult drives, but there's still a significant gap between NAND and DRAM. Intel's Optane memory is meant to sit between DRAM and NAND in much the same fashion equally NAND might sit down betwixt DRAM and a conventional difficult drive in a modern system.

BareOptane

Intel'due south DC P4800X without its cover.

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

IntelPerfGraph

Intel sees ii primary use-cases for the Optane DC P4800X, both shown below:

OptaneSSDUse

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

The price for the 375GB drive, while loftier, is scarcely stratospheric. A PCIe-based P4800X will sell for $ane,520, with a 750GB drive following subsequently this year. While that's a lot for a conventional loftier-speed drive, I remember when SSDs cost more that in terms of $ per GB.

It volition be extremely interesting to see how Optane performs against other SSDs in existent-world workloads. Its latency is excellent, its reliability is outstanding, and if the drive performs every bit promised, it should offer a notable speed increment compared with PCI Limited-based storage solutions.

Now read: How practise SSDs work?