Intel officially announce their consumer Optane memory

Intel officially announce their consumer Optane memory

Intel officially announce their consumer Optane memory

 
Intel has officially announced their consumer-oriented Optane memory, which is designed to act as a fast cache to speed up mechanical and even SSD storage.  
 
XPoint memory is an expensive memory type, though it comes with some huge advantages, like the ability to write memory at a per-bit level and the ability to offer the drive’s full memory speeds at queue depths as low as 4, compared to 32 on NVMe SSDs.  

For consumers, Intel will be releasing Optane memory as “system accelerators”, using 16GB or 32GB of memory as a storage cache to increase the boot times and load times of frequently used applications. Most desktop applications benefit from faster storage at low queue depths, which is where Intel’s Optane memory excels, allowing it to speed up even SSD-based systems. 

 

Intel officially announce their consumer Optane memory

 

The performance characteristics of Optane are nothing short of astounding, offering performance that can easily beat modern NVMe SSDs at low queue depths, which can speed up most modern applications significantly. In short, moving from NAND-based SSDs to Optane will be like moving from a mechanical HDD to an SSD.  

  
Intel officially announce their consumer Optane memory   
Intel officially announce their consumer Optane memory

Right now Optane is only supported on Intel’s Kaby-lake CPUs on 200-series motherboards, with Optane now releasing on some pre-built systems.  

Optane will come in an M.2 form factor and will require Intel’s SRT Caching technology to function as an SSD or HDD caching solution, requiring support for NVMe v1.1 and RST version 15.5, which is only supported on Intel 200-series motherboards at this time. 

  
Intel officially announce their consumer Optane memory

 

Intel does have plans to make a full consumer-oriented Optane SSD in the future, coming with larger storage capacities than their new 32GB and 16GB system accelerators, though the pricing of these new models will likely be insanely high given the price of XPoint when compared to NAND.

 

 

Intel officially announce their consumer Optane memory

 

Right now Intel has not released their Optane system accelerators to the market, or their planned pricing for consumers, though this technology will be available in select pre-built systems within the next month.

 

You can join the discussion on Intel’s Optane system accelerators on the OC3D Forums.

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