Intel’s epoch-making announcement of the new Optane 3D XPoint (pronounced crosspoint) memory includes its use as a type of SSD that can also be used as RAM.
Intel has developed Optane technology in conjunction with Micron Technology. It expects to generate 10% of its memory revenues in 2017 from 3D XPoint and hopes future adoption will largely replace, or at least supplement more expensive DRAM and slower NAND based SSD and spinning disk HDD. iTWire has on overview of the Intel Optane announcement here.
Putting all marketing hype aside this is as significant a scientific advance as the invention of its roots – NAND non-volatile flash memory in 1984. To the lay person, Optane is a type of phase-change-memory (non-volatile – data remains after power off) using nanoscale chalcogenide glass - think of the material like optical rewritable disks where bits can be changed by an electrical pulse to store bytes. Intel says that description is way too simple.
What we do know is that individual cells do not require an associated transistor or laser to change the state of the bit (from on-to-off and vice versa) allowing a packing density four times that of DRAM. Speeds, like DRAM, are measured in nanoseconds where SSD NAND is in microseconds and hard disk in milliseconds.
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Intel is not yet positioning Optane as a general-purpose memory or SSD because its price and therefore substitution advantages are dependent on larger scale adoption.
Intel claims Optane will supplement DRAM, SSD and HDD to provide vastly better speeds for all the above cases. Its go-to-market strategy is to mix some Optane in with DRAM and SSD/HDD storage.
DRAM is expensive, especially in the larger capacity 32GB modules demanded by high-density data centres (currently a single 32GB, PC3L ECC module costs about A$15 per GB).
Mixing some lower cost Optane memory on the same memory bus will help to less expensively extend memory capacity, speed up paging/swapping and assist with caching of frequently used data, apps and operating systems – as it is non-volatile data remains in memory and second-time use is instant.
The Intel Optane 375GB SSD starts at US$1,520 – about $4 per gigabyte. Traditional SSD is about 50 cents per GB so at one-eighth of the price these won’t be going anywhere soon.
Mixing in Optane based SSD, also for use as extended memory or an SSD/HDD cache adds performance and becomes a more cost-effective option, especially where the data centre pricing model is based on IOPS or transactions per second.
Regardless of the technology marvels behind Intel Optane, the major memory and storage growth drivers are data centres, big data, analytics, AI and machine learning. One of the immutable laws of analytics is to do as much in faster memory as possible because swapping from memory to hard disk can decrease processing speeds by thousands of times. Optane addresses this.
There is no information about how long Intel has exclusivity on the technology but Micron has started talking about its QuantX brand “shipping at the end of the year” so it is likely we will see further adoption after Intel has set the scene. Micron has stated that it expects QuantX to sell for about half the price of DRAM and five times the price of SSD.
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