Intel Demonstrates 3D XPoint Optane SSD At Computex, Kaby Lake Details Emerge

[bit_user]

If Intel listened to their users a little more, maybe some of us might actually get what we want from Intel, instead of being required to find solutions elsewhere and/or being required to purchase features that we do not need or want.

Intel wants you to buy their workstation/server chipsets and CPUs. To be honest, I haven't tried to follow all of your various points, but I get the sense that your problem is trying to do something more with their desktop platform than they care to support.

My fileserver is an old AMD Phenom II, on a 890 FX board. Not the most energy-efficient CPU, but I love that chipset. It supports ECC patrol scrub, 6x SATA3 ports, and more PCIe 2.0 lanes than I could ever use. And the board + CPU was cheaper than any Xeon board. If they offer an equivalent chipset for Zen w/ PCIe 3.0, I'm already sold.

 

[MRFS]

There's a very good summary of SATA-Express here by JohnnyLucky:

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2397347/asus-hyper-express-ssd-bought.html

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There are no SATA Expess consumer ssd's being manufactured. The SATA Express standard was a last ditch effort by the SATA organization to try and compete with new PCIe and M.2 ssd's. Motherboard and mobile pc manufacturers bypassed SATA Express ssd's because the new PCIe and M.2 ssd's already outperformed SATA Express. In addition the M.2 drives were more attractive because they were small enough to fit in tablets and notebooks. It also solved a problem. One small ssd could work for both desktop and mobile pc's. Mobile pc's have been outselling desktop pc's and this year will be a banner year for the mobile market. It sort of like a one size fits all situation.

The Asus Hyper Express is not an ssd. It is an adapter that can handle either two M.2 ssd's or two mSATA ssd's that are connected to a motherboard via a SATA Express cable. A consumer would still have to purchase the ssd's. The other problem is that the M.2 ssd performance is limited to PCIe 2.0 x 2. There are PCIe 3.0 x 4 and M.2 3.0 x 4 ssd's that perform much better.

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[Samer1970]

https://www.sata-io.org/

Then go ahead and let them know that you don't approve of them leaving SATA in the dust for superior connection methods.

SATA Express already beats USB 3.1, it can go up to 2GB/s.

Then we have M.2 using PCIe which can hit 32Gbps or roughly 3.2GB/s.

Actually we should abandon SATA all together and use SAS ... which extends to more drives as we wish and supports 4 drives per one cable reducing the cables used by 75% !!! and will use less space on motherboards .. 1 plug instead of 4 ...

I remember back when we had IDE and SCSI ... we all used SCSI even for DVD/CD roms and abandoned IDE (in high end systems)

There is no point in using SATA when we can use SAS very easy ..

I wish u2 (4 lanes or more) replaces the SATA all together as well

SAS is too expensive for consumers much like SCSI was more expensive than PATA at the time. SAS was specifically designed with servers and network storage in mind and has advantages for that.

With M.2 and NVDIMMs we wont need either in the near future.

.

Well thats why I said "High end system" scsi being expensive in the past did not stop us from using them ... Remember old PCs like Amiga ? they used SCSI as standard for their harddisks and not IDE ...

Also before the Raptors we used 15K SCSI drives remember ?

expensive ? yes but not that much when you pay $3000 for your PC ..

Besides , you can still use SATA devices on SAS , each SAS port can connect up to 4 SATA drives ... so why adding stupid SATA on the motherboard ? some Server chipsets from intel Support SAS drives...and they are not expensive.. Also SAS 12 cards can be bought from $150 ...

yea and SAS 12 appeared waaay before any Sata express

 

[bit_user]

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If you want to quote something that's not a message, just put it in [ quote ] .. [/ quote ] tags.

 

[MRFS]

FYI: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-xeon-skylake-purley-cpu,31980.html

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The slides also tout a persistent "all new memory architecture" that offers up to 4x the capacity of RAM and 500x the performance of NAND. These specifications do not align exactly with Intel's much-ballyhooed 3D XPoint claims of "1000x the performance and endurance of NAND with 10x the density of DRAM." The Purley presentation reportedly occurred on May 11, 2015, which is before the official 3D XPoint announcement on July 28, 2015. This suggests that Intel may have tweaked the final performance specifications between the presentation and the formal announcement.

The 2U server we observed at Computex features a total of 12 memory slots per socket, which is indicative of a new hexa-channel memory controller. This tracks well with other industry reports at Computex that Intel is laying the 3D XPoint foundation by enabling more slots for system memory on emerging platforms, such as Kaby Lake. We expect 3D XPoint-based NVDIMMs will play a large role in the Purley platform, as well.

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[Kewlx25]

Of course I don't expect 1000x faster but I am excited as I think it will be awesome to have storage that acts like RAM allowing the entire OS to literally sit in memory and thus load up almost instantly.

That is the dream, innit? I've toyed around with VMs loaded onto ramdisks in the past. Nothing like booting an OS in under 3 seconds.

It is cool, but my Win10 machine already boots in under 10 seconds with a Samsung 850 Evo. NVMe XPoint is going to be sweet.