Intel’s High-Speed SSD Coming in 2016

Intel has unveiled the Optane, its new high-speed SSD brand, at the Intel Developer Conference in San Francisco. The super-fast solid state drive, produced in conjunction with Micron, could be released as early as next year, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich revealed during his keynote speech.

Optane drives operate using Intel’s 3D XPoint technology, which is up to one hundred times faster than NAND. It is non-volatile, has around 10-times greater density than DRAM, but its performance can be anywhere between up to 100 times faster than conventional flash drives, with latencies up to 1000x faster.

However, speeds will be limited for the time being by existing interfaces. According to Intel’s live demonstration during the conference, its early prototype Optane drive has 7.23x the IOPs of Intel’s top-range NAND SSD, the DC P3700, with hopes that the drive will become even faster by the time of release.

“We’re hitting a bottleneck with current storage architecture,” Krzanich explained, adding that computer architectures will need to change in order for users to enjoy the full benefits of 3D XPoint technology.

Optane drives will be available in standard PCIe form, but also in DIMM for Xeon systems, offering greater bandwidth and lower latencies. Both include storage controllers optimised to take full advantage of the 3D XPoint memory.

Thank you Intel for providing us with this information.