‘First Intel Optane products offer 16GB and 32GB 3D XPoint memory’

The first products based on 3D XPoint memory are said to be two Optane Memory 8000p modules, of 16GB and 32GB. Intel would like to market them as memory for system acceleration and not as SSDs.

Intel’s Series Optane Memory 8000p will be available in 16GB and 32GB configurations and in the m2-2280 and m2-2241 form factors using the PCI-e 3.0 x2 bandwidth. This is reported by the Taiwanese site Benchlife, which more often publishes information about Intel products early. The 32GB variant offers better read and write speeds: 1600MB/s and 500MB/s in succession. With the 16GB variant, the sequential read and write speeds are 1400MB/s and 300MB/s respectively. The claimed random 4k read and write speeds are also in the table published by BenchLife.

Information about the controller used is not yet available. The modules would be intended for combination with Intel’s Kaby Lake and later platforms, it is unclear whether there will be support for earlier platforms. On a previously released roadmap about Intel’s Optane memory, System Acceleration was codenamed “Stony Beach” with a release window of late 2016.

By that time, Mansion Beach should also appear, the first PCI-e 3.0 x4 SSD based on the new type of memory. Brighton Beach will follow in early 2017, the pci-e 3.0 x2 variant. 3D XPoint is 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. It must combine the speed of working memory with the storage capacity of flash memory. According to the company, in the future, the memory could be 1000 times faster than nand, last 1000 times longer and reach ten times the density of dram, making it much cheaper.