New SSDs on IDF: Optane and nvme from Kingston and OCZ
During the Intel Developer Forum, Intel lifted a corner of the veil on its new memory architecture. However, other companies also showed a sneak peek of their new SSDs.
For example, Kingston has shown its latest HyperX Predator SSD. The company’s current Predator SSDs are m2 SSDs with a pcie 3.0 x4 interface and an optional add-in card adapter. However, these are still standard SSDs with an AHCI interface. The new Predator SSDs leave the old ahci technique behind and become NVME SSDs. This should drastically improve performance and, above all, result in more scalable SSDs.
Kingston showed off a fairly early prototype of the nvme version of the Predator. The 480GB model was not yet equipped with shrouds or heatsinks, but managed to reach about 230,000iops in IOMeter. According to a Kingston employee, the product will be announced around CES in January next year, with availability later that year. The back-up power capacitors seen on the pcb would not necessarily be found on the products to be released; Kingston is still considering that, not least because it adds about thirty dollars to the production price. The capacities would be 480GB, 960GB and probably higher.
OCZ also showed a new pcie drive, but many details about it are not yet known. The RevoDrive 400 will be an NVME drive, with a Toshiba controller and ditto nand. The RevoDrive 400 should be released around November.
3D XPoint technology
Intel announced its 3D XPoint technology at the end of July, which promised to be a completely new type of memory. The memory works somewhat like phase change memory, where bits are stored by physical changes in a medium. Thus, charges are not stored in memory using transistors, as in ram and nand. The 3D XPoint memory is also three-dimensional, which significantly increases the density; the first generation consists of 128Gb dies . Intel promises 1000 times the speed and 1000 times the lifespan of nand, and ten times the data density of ram.
During the IDF, Intel announced the market name of the 3D XPoint memory; it should appear on the market as Intel Optane Technology in 2016. It will initially do so as storage, comparable to SSDs, for all product lines from servers to embedded storage in tablets, for example. The technology should only become available as memory modules for Xeon servers at a later stage. During the keynote, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich showed some benchmarks of an Optane SSD .