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  • eddman - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    I'm a bit confused. Is this second gen 3D xpoint, or second gen optane? I was under the impression the actual second gen 3D xpoint was not ready.
  • Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    The second generation Optane SSDs (due later this year) will use second-gen 3DXP. The second-gen Optane DCPMM (already on the market) still uses first-gen 3DXP.
  • yeeeeman - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    They must be stupid to not capitalize on this tech and not go all aboard adding more layers to it.
  • Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    Adding layers to 3DXP is a lot more expensive than adding layers to 3D NAND. Right now, aiming for really high layer counts would end up increasing $/GB. The situation might change as the tech matures, but it'll never be as easy to scale vertically as 3D NAND.
  • Desierz - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    I wonder when it will come down in price to compete with NAND. Economies of scale may not apply as much here, since there's only one supplier. I don't think Micron has released anything yet. The X100 can't be bought yet at least. I'm talking both consumer and other products, like NV-RAM, which is tied to Xeon CPUs for now. I assume Micron will engineer them so they work with other architectures. But it sure is taking its sweet time.
  • Slash3 - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    Never, it's just the unfortunate reality of the much more complex physical process vs NAND. Which is a shame, as Optane / 3DXpoint is a phenomenal underlying technology.

    Adler Stream can't come soon enough.
  • edzieba - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link

    It's not a fundamental technology limit, more just sheer production volume and time advantage for NAND flash.

    NAND flash drives were around for decades before the first consumer SSDs, and even then early consumer drives (e.g. the X-25M at ~$7.5/GB) were far more expensive per GB than 3DXP launched at ($4/GB for the DC P4800X, $2.4/GB for the 'Optane Memory drives')!
  • trivik12 - Tuesday, August 18, 2020 - link

    I dont think it has to be cheaper than NAND. This is an enterprise product. What is needed is to up the size, performance across the board and increase DWPD even more. That will ensure its fastest and most enduring storage available. The cost would not matter if you are running critical production data bases or any data analytics/Machine learning. Market for enterprise/cloud would be huge.

    Plus with cheaper QLC 144 layer SSD for offline storage Intel has products to tackle a market that is growing exponentially.

    Cant wait to see how fast optane can be with PCI-E 4.0 interface and new driver. Can Samsung still keep the lead with high end MLC SSD?
  • plopke - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    So they keep improving 3D Xpoint but not fabricating any of it? Micron still producing it all? Did we ever see Micron products ?
  • plopke - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    nevermind article still states produced by Micron
  • Diogene7 - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    Is there any hope that in end of 2020 or in 2021, we could see (Optane) Persistent Memory Module (PMM) for consumer processor for enthusiasts (ex: Tiger Lake, or one of its successor) ?

    I am dreaming of a thin lightweight and fanless laptop that would use a bootable 512GB (Optane) Persistent Memory Module (PMM) to drastically reduce access latency : should make for zippy software launch, content access,... as SSD did compare to HDD...

    Of course, I understand there would be a cost premium for it, but if it stay in a « reasonable » range (500$ to 1500$ depending on the capacity of the PMM), I would definitely consider it.
  • Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    So far, the roadmaps only mention DCPMM support for Xeons (server and workstation). Considering that the second-gen DCPMM got power down from 18W to 15W, there's still a long way to go before it can be used in a mobile device.
  • Diogene7 - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    Thanks for the comment Billy.

    Could you provide an indication of how low power PMM would need to be for beginning to consider an integration in a laptop (compare to a standard laptop SSD) ?

    I am not sure but I would say that a 2020 laptop SSD may need somewhere between 2W and 5W ?

    From there, I would think that Intel would have to have a strong willingness to invest in the development of a PMM optimized for mobile computers for it to happen, but as of 2020, it likely doesn’t make economic sense fir Intel to do so, as Data Center components are likely much more profitable than mobile computing ones...
  • Santoval - Saturday, August 15, 2020 - link

    "as SSD did compare to HDD"
    This comparison is invalid because even vanilla flash SSDs are far, *far* faster than HDDs than how faster Optane is over flash SSDs. The most interesting bit about Optane, in my opinion, is its very high endurance.
  • Jorgp2 - Sunday, August 30, 2020 - link

    Optane is to SSDs, as SSDs are to hard drives.

    The worst case latency of Optane is better than the best case of conventional NAND SSDs.
    There's also the fact that Optane does not slow down due to load.
  • FunBunny2 - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    for those interested in how freaky things might get with persistent memory, aka Optane, here's an Intel paper from last fall: https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/devel...
  • Kevin G - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    Lots of potential here I see being waisted due to Intel market segmentation. The idea of merging traditional RAM and storage into one pool is *huge* that could improve computing in all segments. Yet Intel keeps that isolated to their high end servers which hinders software developers due to cost.

    The flips is that as a for SSD, these are still good and should really benefit from PCIe 4.0. Eager to see what happens there.
  • amnesia0287 - Thursday, August 13, 2020 - link

    That’s mostly just related to cost tho. Optane is just too expensive for average consumers.
  • FunBunny2 - Friday, August 14, 2020 - link

    "Optane is just too expensive"

    well, yes and no. the major problem with capital intensive production is that the only way to lower average cost is to push output to the max; there's no variable cost, aka labor, to adjust to meet output size. unfortunately, too many of the CxO class still think like it's 1859.
  • azfacea - Friday, August 14, 2020 - link

    50% chance intel is just lying and has no such products anywhere in existence this year or any year. the other 50% chance goes to its also no less than 4 times expensive.
  • arianstatovci - Friday, August 14, 2020 - link

    Future alien technology well done to Intel xx
  • Tomatotech - Saturday, August 15, 2020 - link

    Nice to see new developments on Optane / 3D XPoint.

    It's a little bit saddening that it hasn't made as much impact / been deployed as widely as it should have. Mostly due to internal politics / market segmentation.

    I don't think I've ever seen an Optane install (either RAM or SSD) anywhere in the wild or seen a comment from anyone who owns one of them (outside of review / comparison articles). Billy do you know anyone who does? (Probably!)

    Would be nice to have a mini-review / interview someone who has deployed them at work.
  • FunBunny2 - Saturday, August 15, 2020 - link

    "Billy do you know anyone who does? (Probably!)"

    well, Oracle has been releasing reports that they're building machines with Optane DIMMs. how many exist in the wild, is another question.

    in general, transactional apps. like RDBMS would seem to be ideal for Optane. but that's just me.
  • Adramtech - Sunday, August 16, 2020 - link

    https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Optane-Memory-2280-ME...
  • epobirs - Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - link

    I have one of the 32GB Optane cache modules in the second M.2 slot of one of my machines. It speeds up, somewhat, access to one the multi-TB hard drive storing games from Steam, Epic, Twitch, etc. Since this isn't the boot drive the effect can only be perceived occasionally. Not really worth the money for a secondary hard drive but it was a fun experiment at the time. I'm likely to put a different device in that M.2 slot when the right deal comes along. At least a TB to just hold really big games in their entirety, with an eye toward new releases that know how to make active use of an SSD. The pressure from the new consoles should help drive that, along with having massive amounts of RAM.
  • PopinFRESH007 - Saturday, November 28, 2020 - link

    I have 2x of the 905P 512GB Optane SSD in VROC RAID0 for an OS array.
  • Kallan007 - Tuesday, October 20, 2020 - link

    Oh damn, a bunch of Intel MBs will become useless and will not be able to take advantage of the new Intel Alder Stream Optane SSDs. Well, ain't that a hoot.

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