Intel Shows Optane (3D XPoint) In A Backup Device At IDF Shenzhen

[Guest]

Optane was on display in China at the Intel Developers Forum. During a keynote, Rob Crooke took to the stage to show the world's most expensive Thunderbolt 3 data backup storage appliance.

Intel Shows Optane (3D XPoint) In A Backup Device At IDF Shenzhen : Read more

 

[Mac266]

Mobile phones aren't instant booting. They do instantly wake, but that's only because the device is still active with the screen turned off. That line makes very little sense.

 

[nukemaster]

Mobile phones aren't instant booting. They do instantly wake, but that's only because the device is still active with the screen turned off. That line makes very little sense.

I was thinking the same thing. I mean phones are actually not that fast to start from fully off.

 

[CRamseyer]

People associate instant-on devices with phone and tablets. In this case it is literally the thought that counts.

 

[JQB45]

I've never thought of a tablet of smart phone as being instant booting, either. From fully off to ready to use takes a decent amount of time.

 

[DeadlyDays]

my desktop boots faster than my phone lol, but I get the idea

 

[Mac266]

As a comparison, I can turn my monitor off when I'm not using it, and then on when I want to use it. Like a phone, storage speed has very little to do with screen activation.

 

[epobirs]

Seems like this was more of a demonstration of Thunderbolt 3 than Optane since they could have gotten the same effect going between two PCIe x4 M.2 SSDs.

When testing USB 3.1 the only way I could see the full read performance was to have a Samsung 950 as the destination. Otherwise the write speed of the destination would have been a bottleneck. I suppose I could have tested doing a copy from the USB 3.1 SSD to a RAM disk but that didn't seem like a very real world situation.

 

[jt AJ]

wheres the latency and 4k qd 1 read/write i wanna see them NOW

 

[rantoc]

Almost makes me wonder if they had alternative motives - like hiding yet to hammer out low random access times - for doing it this "lame" way...

 

[hannibal]

When we can not see products for long time it is quite normal to show only "minor" stuff at this moment. The sales of today devices would blum...

 

[jaber2]

This is a great example where marketing took over a product and tried to find some way to make it look cooler

 

[Johnpombrio]

I thought Intel and Micron were in production of X-Point already.

 

[blackbit75]

It they were selling SSD in that room, instead of 3d XPoint, the image would show 1.9Gb/s(1969 MB/s Sata express?) instead of 284Mb/s

 

[TbsToy]

Uhhhh, that is a 25 GB file transfer! 2GB speed is not fast huh?
W.P.

P.S. This is a transfer between XPoint and Nand. What will speeds look like between XPoint and XPoint?

 

[nukemaster]

Large files transfer much faster than small files. It will be interesting to see the random numbers for sure.

 

[photonboy]

TbsToy,
It WAS between SSD and SSD for the first system and XPoint and XPoint for the second system.

Regardless, as said XPoint can access small file sizes much better so a large file transfer is a poor test to show its real potential.

No idea when we'll see desktop PC's designed to use this in a scenario where it replaces system memory and the main drive though.

 

[zodiacfml]

I think it was intentional to show it at the least light as they slowly give more information till it ships.
The idea of cache is very good though as it will get rid of the capacitors required in enterprise ssds. As cache, it will minimize the differences between SSDs even more.

As a small cache technology, it might not scale or improve as fast.

 

[blackbit75]

Sorry, my previous message was incomplete. It they were selling flash SSD in that room, instead of 3d XPoint, the image would show 1.9Gb/s for flash(1969 MB/s Sata express?) instead of 284Mb/s.

 

[Elrabin]

TbsToy,
It WAS between SSD and SSD for the first system and XPoint and XPoint for the second system.

Regardless, as said XPoint can access small file sizes much better so a large file transfer is a poor test to show its real potential.

No idea when we'll see desktop PC's designed to use this in a scenario where it replaces system memory and the main drive though.

Skylake for servers, E5 2600v5, are going to have 6 extra NVDIMM slots in addition to their 16 to 24 DIMM slots on a 2 socket server

Given Skylake for servers isn't going to be out for a year yet, I don't imagine this is going to be mainstream for desktops for quite a while yet. Best guess? Two years minimum

 

[JQB45]

@Elrbin - no it will take some time before everyone except the rich or well to do businesses can afford it.

 

[Elrabin]

@Elrbin - no it will take some time before everyone except the rich or well to do businesses can afford it.

That's what I said. It's a year before the technology is available in "mainstream" servers and at least two years before it's available in desktops.

Available does not equal standard.

Also, with how aggressively Intel has been pushing NVMe and the extremely competitive price points they're putting it at for big businesses, I can see them selling at cost or with minimal margin to get big businesses hooked on the speed of NVMe/Optane/NVDIMM

Why would anyone buy a 15k disk or SAS SSD when for $50 more you could get an NVMe SSD that's dozens of times faster than the HDD and 5x faster than the SAS SSD?

This is happening at huge corporations right now.

 

[megiv]

Ok, and how much it cost per 1 GB ? this is the real question here...

 

[kittle]

From what I hear, this stuff is supposed to retain its info even when the power is off.

a TRUE demo would be to suspend/sleep/whatever a PC with this stuff as RAM/HDD. Pull the power plug, move it to a different plug, and then do their 'instant on' thing.

 

[Elrabin]

From what I hear, this stuff is supposed to retain its info even when the power is off.

a TRUE demo would be to suspend/sleep/whatever a PC with this stuff as RAM/HDD. Pull the power plug, move it to a different plug, and then do their 'instant on' thing.

It's an SSD, even in NVDIMM format, of course it retains data with no power.