Intel 3D XPoint, Pictured: Microsoft Joins The Party

[Guest]

We had an impromptu photo shoot with Intel's 3D XPoint NVDIMM product and learned a few more details about its density characteristics. It offers up to 512 GB of storage per NVDIMM and 6 TB per dual-socket server.

Intel 3D XPoint, Pictured: Microsoft Joins The Party : Read more

 

[ZolaIII]

It will probably be the same story as with FPGA integrated Xeon's, that they will ship only to the biggest direct costumers like Google. This is bad for a computing generally & it's becoming a habit. To be honest I didn't expect much from the Intel but I am disappointed with silence from Micron from whom I expected a real effort on commercialization.

 

[DrakeFS]

It will probably be the same story as with FPGA integrated Xeon's, that they will ship only to the biggest direct costumers like Google. This is bad for a computing generally & it's becoming a habit. To be honest I didn't expect much from the Intel but I am disappointed with silence from Micron from whom I expected a real effort on commercialization.

If you go by the initial release info provided from Intel, Optane will be the branding of its consumer 3D Xpoint offerings. Supposedly we (consumers) will be seeing 3D Xpoint SSDs at some point (which I hope live up to the hype, 70k IOPs at a queue depth of 1 will be amazing for gaming machines).

 

[PaulyAlcorn]

I agree that as a block device (storage essentially) 3D XPoint will definitely be great for high-performance PC's, but I think that it is telling that all of the work to use the new memory as DRAM (byte-addressable) is in the server realm - they didn't mention any changes to Windows 10.

 

[megiv]

And again, the single most important detail is missing - price per GB !

 

[PaulyAlcorn]

And again, the single most important detail is missing - price per GB !

*shakes fist* (as well)

 

[RamCity]

This is the most exciting development in storage tech (for me at least) since M.2 PCIe SSD's. So from a consumer perspective, if I understand this correctly, once 3D XPoint SSD's become a reality, Microsoft needs to add the SCM-awareness to NTFS/ReFS so that we can actually use the hardware in a system, plus motherboard manufacturers need to get on board and add NVDIMM sockets. Or will the NVDIMM's work in existing DDR4 sockets? (I couldn't figure that out from the other 3D XPoint article)

 

[PaulyAlcorn]

The 3D XPoint products will come in two flavors - one will be a simple SSD, much like the 2.5" and M.2 we have today. It will work just as a normal SSD would - plug and play.
The other flavor allows it to function as DRAM, or system memory. This type (shown in the article) of device (an NVDIMM) will require SCM awareness.

It appears from the direction things are going that using it as DRAM in a PC will not happen, it will likely only be for servers. However, good news for us, they will bring it out as regular storage devices to replace/supplement SSDs/HDDs.

 

[CRamseyer]

With the high cost per gigabit I see this technology used as a tier 0 cache for slower TLC-based SSDs. This would increase the endurance of low cost TLC and do a better job of masking native TLC write performance.

I think the die will be expensive at first because Intel and Micron displayed a wafer at a launch event. I didn't break out a ruler or take exact measurements but the number of die per wafer was much lower than regular NAND flash.