Intel Optane Memory
Optane makes an appearance in the wild
INTEL RECENTLY REVEALED its newest SSD solution, the Optane SSD DC P4800X, a datacenter drive boasting extreme endurance. The 375GB model will be rated at 12–20PB of writes, or 30 complete drive writes per day for three to five years. But endurance isn’t the only impressive aspect of Optane.
The drive will also have exceptional latency, typically less than 10 microseconds up to the 99th percentile. By comparison, Intel’s DC P3700 is a few thousand microseconds under similar workloads. Perhaps most importantly, Intel is promising breakthrough performance at low queue depths—even though most SSDs are rated at QD32, in the real world, no SSD is running anything beyond maybe QD8, with over 95 percent of operations taking place at QD1–4.
All of that should prove incredibly useful for servers, but we will have to wait until the second half of 2017 before we begin to see consumer versions of the drive. Which is probably for the best, because even the 375GB model will set you back a staggering $1,520, never mind the future 750GB and 1.5TB models.
Optane Memory is a different story, slated to launch within the month— we’ll have actual performance metrics available next issue. Optane Memory is less exciting, mostly because it has a limited area of use. For $45, Kaby Lake CPU and motherboard users can get a 16GB Optane Memory adapter that will improve system performance via intelligent caching, or $80 will buy you a 32GB module.
And there’s the rub: How will a 1TB HDD plus 16GB Optane Memory solution fare compared to just buying a 480GB budget SSD? When the data you’re after is on the Optane cache, performance should be excellent, but if it’s not, and you have to go to the hard drive… get ready to visit Sluggishville, USA. On the other hand, if you already have a Kaby Lake system, with or without an SSD, Optane Memory should make it better.