Intel optane 3DXPOINT SSDs in 2016

[ShintaiDK]

The next storage revolution is here.

Products will span from Ultrabooks to Datacenter. Including DIMMs.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9539/intel-idf-2015-live-blog#post0818132759

Compared against a P3700 SSD.

 

[meloz]

These would make terrific boot drives and database drives. For affordable bulk storage (10-20 TB) Samsung and Toshiba's future V-nand products should suffice.

Funny how 3D-XPoint will do to SSD what SSDs did to HDDs. Although for more 'consumer' workloads the added performance benefit of 3D-Xpoint will not be noticable in daily use, and SSDs will continue to flourish and eradicate HDDs.

 

[Rubycon]

These would make terrific boot drives and database drives. For affordable bulk storage (10-20 TB) Samsung and Toshiba's future V-nand products should suffice.

Funny how 3D-XPoint will do to SSD what SSDs did to HDDs. Although for more 'consumer' workloads the added performance benefit of 3D-Xpoint will not be noticable in daily use, and SSDs will continue to flourish and eradicate HDDs.

:thumbsup:

 

[Arachnotronic]

OK, this is darn cool. If I can buy a 3D XPoint SSD for my next build, I'll be thrilled.

 

[Khato]

3D XPoint SSDs are indeed going to be awesome, especially since it sounds like we won't have to wait as long as I'd initially expected!

But yeah, 3D NAND based mass storage isn't going anywhere most likely. Rather we're likely to see a repeat of hybrid storage where 128-256 GB of 3D XPoint is combined with multiple TB of 3D NAND. Such a combined drive allows for more dynamic/frequently used data to be stored on the 3D XPoint buffer and drastically reduce the number of write cycles to the 3D NAND while markedly increasing performance. Will be interesting to see how the Intel/Micron 3D NAND compares to Samsung on price - will we actually see the promised disruptive cost or not?

 

[etherealfocus]

Any benefits from XPoint being nonvolatile?

Also, are we really sure the performance won't be noticeable vs an SSD for client stuff? Sure nobody's gonna pay tons of attention to Windows and Outlook loading 1-2s faster but my understanding is that we are still IOPS/throughput limited for tasks like installing big apps from iso, uncompressing large files, loading games/levels, Photoshop, etc.

The diff between, say, and 850 Evo vs 850 Pro isn't noticeable because it's a very small difference outside of some pro applications. The diff between an 850 Evo and something that smokes the SM951, on the other hand, I'd think would be pretty obvious to anyone who regularly waits, say, 30 seconds for their game levels to load.

Is there some other limiting factor in such situations I'm unaware of?

 

[etherealfocus]

Personally I live comfortably in 250GB so I'd love to just have a nice little Xpoint M.2 card in my laptop and have near-instant loading of everything. Don't really need anything faster than my Evo, but even Word's 1-2s load time is just long enough to be distracting.

Seems like XPoint might also open the doors to better price points: the speed could enable more transparent compression like Win8/10 uses and reduce need for lots of DRAM and/or pseudo-SLC cache, and the increased durability means less reserved space = lower overhead.

 

[cbn]

I would be interested to see how a small amount of this 3DXpoint storage works as a cache (using Intel SRT).

This compared to using a larger SSD with a partition dedicated to Intel SRT cache and a partition for OS/applications. (Instructions on how to use a single SSD for boot and cache here)

 

[ShintaiDK]

OK, this is darn cool. If I can buy a 3D XPoint SSD for my next build, I'll be thrilled.

Same here. :biggrin:

NVME and 3DXPoint will be a complete killer.

 

[redzo]

The next storage revolution is here.
Products will span from Ultrabooks to Datacenter. Including DIMMs.

Will it be priced between NAND and RAM? If true, how is it supposed to gain ultra-book market share against NAND?
How much expensive compared to high I/O enterprise and high end consumer SSDs. Better end up very close to NAND in pricing. This is gonna be interesting...

 

[ShintaiDK]

Price should be close to NAND.

Its a technology that will really utilize nvme.

Please already pay hefty premiums for faster SSDs. So paying the same or maybe a bit more for one that makes those look slow. I dont see the issue.

 

[Khato]

Please already pay hefty premiums for faster SSDs. So paying the same or maybe a bit more for one that makes those look slow. I dont see the issue.

How much more is a 3D XPoint drive going to cost though? My guess is that it's going to be quite the premium for awhile due to server demand easily outpacing supply. If I recall the articles correctly, 3D XPoint is initially being produced at one fab, no? And if Intel can sell a 3D XPoint server SSD for $2.5/GB similar to the current P3700 then why would they sell what's basically an equivalent client version, aka SSD 750, for $1/GB?

Now once supply exceeds the lucrative server demand we'll definitely see reasonably-priced client solutions, and I'm guessing that it won't take too long for that to happen. After all, Intel is going to want to press their advantage in order to drive the competition into the low-margin value segment.

 

[ShintaiDK]

We have to see. But since they directly mentioned ultrabooks we also have to expect it there. But I am not fooling myself. I expect it to be like the SM951 type of money. Hopefully without the overheating controller part.

The biggest eater of 3DXPoint may be the Purley platform, but that is 2017. In theory we could get a wierd market that will peak in 2017 with price.

 

[Hellhammer]

We have to see. But since they directly mentioned ultrabooks we also have to expect it there. But I am not fooling myself. I expect it to be like the SM951 type of money. Hopefully without the overheating controller part.

The biggest eater of 3DXPoint may be the Purley platform, but that is 2017. In theory we could get a wierd market that will peak in 2017 with price.

It's going to be way more than that. Intel and Micron are the only companies that will be shipping next generation NVM next year and they will for sure milk every cent of profit out of it before others have equivalent technologies on the market. My guess is ~$4 per gigabyte, which would put it in between enterprise SSDs and DRAM; that's the only pricing that makes sense because otherwise the companies would undercut their NAND sales (and the companies made it clear they are still fully invested on 3D NAND).

Mentioning ultrabooks doesn't mean that there will be 128GB or 256GB of it for storage. It may very well be another cache layer of 16GB or 32GB, which is enough to enable true instant on experience.

 

[ShintaiDK]

SM951 price is still over 2x of the MX200 style price.

 

[Hellhammer]

SM951 price is still over 2x of the MX200 style price.

The SM951 isn't a retail product. The few retailers that have it are charging a hefty premium for it because they can due to the very limited channel availability. In any case, 3D XPoint will not be price competitive with any NAND-based product.

 

[ksec]

Xpoint likely to be Replace the DRAM on current SSD. And May be we have a Hybrid much like SSHD, except with Xpoint and NAND.

The current generation of SSD Controller are incredibly complex from my point of view. It is adding layers and layers of complexity within the Controller software where you have no control. That is why Enterprise are working on Software Defined SSD with direct access to NAND.

With Xpoint, most common read write files can be cached without any energy cost, and NAND can focus on Seq Read Write Speed and Capacity.