Rumor: Intel will release three lines of Optane SSDs at the end of this year

By admin On Jun 13, 2016

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Intel is planning three lines of its Optane SSDs with the new 3D XPoint storage technology. This is apparent from a roadmap from Intel that has appeared on the internet. The SSDs should appear at the end of this year.

The roadmap has been posted by Benchlife. On that roadmap are Mansion Beach, Brighton Beach and Stony Beach, the three codenames that Intel is grouping its upcoming Optane lines under. Mansion Beach is due to be released in late 2016 and is intended for enthusiast and workstation platforms. These are pci-e 3.0 x4 ssds with an nvme interface.

Brighton Beach is slightly lower in the ranking but is still for demanding users. These SSDs contain a PCI-e 3.0 x2 interface and should be released in early 2017. Finally, there is Stony Beach which is only for system acceleration. Intel does not call this memory SSDs either. The release will take place in the fourth quarter of 2016.

The first Kaby Lake processors should also be ready by then. That these processors, which will succeed the Skylake chips this year, will receive support for Optane memory, was already announced at the end of last year. Kaby Lake, in turn, will be followed by Cannonlake processors, which will be produced at 10nm. The Stony Beach memory will be succeeded by Carson Beach for the upcoming Cannonlake generation and Intel also uses this name for the successor to Brighton Beach. Intel refers to the successor of Mansion Beach for the high-end simply under the name Mansion Beach Refresh.

Intel developed Optane memory in collaboration with Micron. It must combine the speed of working memory with the storage capacity of flash memory. It concerns a form of phase change memory, in which individual cells or bits can be addressed individually, just as with dram: with flash memory, cells are always read per string and written per block. Initially, this concerns 128Gbit chips, which are built around a Cross Point Array Structure, in which up to 128 billion memory cells can be addressed.