If you have followed the latest news from Intel, you might have heard of Optan's memory. If you're confused about what it is and why it matters, you've come to the right place. Optan is an Intel storage technology that can compete with hard drives at an affordable price. Whenever we think of drives, what comes first to our mind is speed. From the ability to provide speeds of 500 MB / s on SATA-based hard drives, to be able to provide speeds of up to 2500 Mbps on hard disk drives based on PCIe, hard drives have come a long way. These high speed drives are trying to get rid of old old mechanical hard drives that provide you terabytes of storage space less than a hundred bucks. This is where Intel is launching, and that's exactly what we'll discuss in detail today. So, without further ado, let me first tell you what Intel is Optane Memory:
What Is Intel Optane Memory?
Intel Optane Memory Technology is the next storage technology designed to make mechanical hard drives much faster at an affordable price, using the non-volatile memory technology known as 3D XPoint. With Optane, Intel wants to provide high-speed and responsive system without compromising the user's system storage capacity. Their way of doing this is using a super-fast cache to work in conjunction with your traditional hard drive. So basically, the latest access data is placed in a high-speed blocking cache, which includes Windows operating system files, game data and much more. This in turn helps to speed up systems that still use mechanical hard drives without breaking the bank.
What Is 3D XPoint?
3D XPoint is a non-volatile memory technology that promises to fill the enormous gap between AMD and NAND Flash, by offering significant improvements in latency and performance. 3D XPoint was announced by Intel and Micron Technology again in July 2015, although development began 3 years ago. Intel claims that 3D XPoint is 1000 times faster than NAND flash, but take it with a grain of salt. This was considered the solution to the physical limitations and cost of AMD which has a limited data center design for years. The first storage devices using 3D XPoint technology are special Optel drives. Although not as fast as some high-end puffer hard drives in the market, Ubuntu-based memory is still considered one of the fastest that is currently in production.
How Does Optane Perform?
The primary optical drives were announced by Intel earlier this year in CISS's 16GB and 32GB variants, which were promised to serve as a cache and speed up traditional hard drives. Although this is the case, Intel also has larger capacity hard drives based on the Optan memory in business, such as the Intel Optane Plug D4 P4800X Series, which has a capacity of 375GB. Intel has recently shared standards on optical drives with greater capacity and compared to the NAND flash based on the Intel DDS P3700 plug, which is nearly 3 years old now. Although the standards have indicated that optical drives will not reach the performance levels that Intel claimed, at least in real-world use, it shows enough potential and could end up as future storage technology.
According to Intel standards, the Optane P4800X was based nearly 7-8 times faster than the older P3700 in the standard data block with a 70 percent load and 30 percent write. Intel claimed that Optan shows its real potential when it reads and writes at random, with speeds up to ten times faster than traditional hard drives when it is maximized.
Another thing that optical drives excel in latency. Today, there is a big gap between the delays of Flash Nand and AMD. Optiman plugged the gap between Nand and AMD, by offering much less time periods than NAND flash and just 10 times higher than the AMD time. This is a great improvement, given Optan is a non-volatile memory.
In addition, Intel also claims that Optiman memory provides up to 4.42 times I / O operations per second, compared with any nand-based plug-in plug.
Why Does Intel Optane Matter?
One of the biggest reasons behind Intel's Optiman memory is a great deal because it can make our old mechanical hard drives relevant again. Using Optiman as a cache memory and hard drive as the primary storage, it can greatly speed up our system and improve multifunctional response at an affordable price. Yes, you do not necessarily have to spend hundreds of dollars on hard drives puff-based PKY anymore. These two CPU buffers are in the M.2 form factor and can be easily inserted into the M.2 slot on the motherboard of your computer. On the other hand, the 375 GB Optin-based hard drive is fast enough to be used as random access memory (RAM). Well, if this does not excite you enough, I have no idea what it will.
Release Dates and Pricing
As we discussed earlier, the Optan cache will be available in 16GB and 32GB variants in the M.2 form factor for $44 and $77 respectively. Now this is an affordable pricing for something that can speed up your good old mechanical hard drive up to 14 times faster. It can also improve the overall speed of your computer based on your hard drives by 28%. The engines are expected to be available from April 24 .
There are more expensive Optan drives based in the pipeline as well. Take the Intel DTS P4800X Ceres plug-in for example, which costs $1520 huge making it a more expensive way to even the fastest plug-in dam in the world - the Samsung 960 Pro. The P4800X is currently only available to select Intel customers in the ship program in advance, with a wider availability by the second half of 2017. There will also be higher capacity variants - 750GB and 1.5 TB which are expected to be available in the WSI and U.2 form factor By the end of this year.
Device Support for Octane
Intel Optane will be supported with almost all Kaby Lake processors except Pentium and Celeron CPUs based on Lake Kappi. Even higher-end processors are not compatible with Intel Optane memory. Most older motherboards are not supported either. Manufacturers of motherboards such as ASUS, Macy and Gigabit have updated Pius on the latest motherboards to support the Optane memory technology. You can check the full compatibility list here.
Also, Intel designed Optane Memory initially to use desktop computers and support notebook and smartphones coming at a later stage.
Is Optane The Future of Storage?
This is the question you may have on your mind now after reading the entire article. According to me, the answer is, although Optane shows serious possibilities, only time will tell whether it will be the preferred storage technology of the future. Once launched, we will be able to do some real world performance tests to see what they are actually capable of. So far, we can not do anything other than confidence Intel's bold claims. So, what do you think of Intel Optane technology? are you excited? Please let us know by shooting your opinions in the comments section below.
