Intel Announces Optane Brand of 3D XPoint Storage Devices

At the Intel Developer Forum, a new storage technology was announced called 3D XPoint (crosspoint) which will find its way into Intel’s new Optane brand of SSDs.

The technology is a hybrid of sorts that was originally announced last month, being 1000 times more durable than NAND Flash (and supposedly 1000 times faster too), but 10 times denser than DRAM. It’s a super-high speed non-volatile memory type that’s likely to take the world by storm in the coming years. Co-developed with Micron, it’s the first new technology to come out since NAND in the last 25 years.

While initial speeds are not as dramatic as the original announcement, it’s still significantly faster than existing flash-based technologies. Use cases are likely to be limited right now, as it’s going to be super-expensive, at least to begin with. Being a hybrid technology, it doesn’t match the speed of DRAM or the density of NAND SSDs, but there are circumstances where it’ll provide a massive performance boost.

On the server front, it will inevitably be used for databases and caching. Keeping things in memory can be expensive for large data assets, and SSDs aren’t quite as instantaneous compared to RAM, so a hybrid storage that’s super-fast will be worth its weight in gold (probably literally).

The first Optane devices will be PCIe-based cards that’s reported to be 7x faster than Intel’s P3700 SSDs, at a queue depth of just 1. Total IOps is expected to be at least 5x faster overall. Don’t expect this technology in SATA based SSDs, as SATA is just too slow; this will be for M.2 based drives, SATA Express and direct PCIe cards. Intel will be making controllers for the 3D XPoint technology as well, so that other manufacturers can bundle it in with their own storage solutions.

No pricing has been divulged just yet, but expect to see these drives released some time in 2016.