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Last twelvemonth, Intel and Micron announced that they'd adult a new retentiveness standard. This new memory, 3D XPoint (pronounced "crosspoint") is a non-volatile memory that Intel is advertising as the first major memory quantum in 25 years. Early on speculation was that 3D XPoint would exist based or at least related-to phase change memory, but Intel has denied that this is the case without specifying the exact details of how Optane really works. Intel has been claiming that 3D XPoint (marketed every bit Optane) would deliver up to 1000x the operation of NAND wink, and the company actually demoed the new technology live at Shenzhen IDF this week.

The demo video is courtesy of PC Perspective and tin exist seen below.

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The video shows an Intel Optane drive pounding the heck out of an SSD with both drives continued via Thunderbolt. Merely there are some serious disparities between the two configurations. The NAND drive is copying from a SATA SSD to an external SSD continued via Thunderbolt, simply the sustained re-create rate of 283MB/southward suggests a serious bottleneck in the system somewhere; SSD-to-SSD copy rates should be higher than that. The Optane-to-Optane copy used a PCI Limited-based bulldoze equally the internal storage, which means it ought to have been compared against an SSD configured in the same fashion. Every bit PC Perspective points out, Intel'south own top-end products can beat Optane in a head-to-head NAND-vs-any-the-heck-Optane-is shootout.

Early days for Optane

The short explanation for this sleight-of-hand is that Intel is still ramping up Optane (mass product is set up for the stop of 2016) and the hardware'due south performance is likely still in early days. Furthermore, there are advantages to a non-volatile memory pool that aren't just performance related — if Intel tin build a storage array that'due south far more than durable than NAND with better admission latencies, than information technology may not matter if maximum NAND performance is able to go along up with Optane. Almost of the innovation happening in NAND these days is aimed at increasing its density rather than pushing functioning.

Intel-3D-Xpoint-1.png

Optane'due south compages

It's possible that Optane will boot off at a bespeak similar to high-stop NAND, only calibration more effectively in the long term or by offering nevertheless another storage tier betwixt high-speed, depression-density RAM and traditional difficult drives.

OptaneComparison

And claimed latency improvements

There's no discussion on whether or not Optane will come up to consumer products or how useful it would exist if information technology did. The performance gap between SSDs and HDDs is still larger than the gap between fifty-fifty an older SSD and a modern high-end drive. Optane isn't expected to friction match DRAM operation, and that's more or less what information technology would need to practise to give users a functioning heave to match what SSDs offered over traditional difficult drives.

Now read: How exercise SSDs work?