The latest Intel Developer Forum brought us some news, starting with the formal entry of the giant into the virtual reality market, but if we go back a bit to what happens “inside” our computers, there are certain developments we want to see on the desktop as soon as possible. One of them is Optane, the next generation of Intel SSDs based on its 3D XPoint technology, which, besides being a thousand times faster than traditional NAND, is also non-volatile, which could forever change the way PCs are designed.
A Future Without Separate Memory and Storage
Imagine a future in which system memory and storage are not separated. Imagine, even for a moment, that terms like “RAM,” “hard drives,” or “SSD” simply disappear to create an alternative so fast and advanced that its old limitations make no sense. In short, imagine that one day you walk into a store and ask for a PC “with 16 terabytes,” without any other labels. Those 16 terabytes are RAM and storage at the same time, without losing performance or drastic increases in latency. Today it seems like a dream… but not at Intel, which is advancing its work on 3D XPoint memory. High speed, non-volatile data retention, and low cost. Intel has many plans for this technology, and one of them is to apply it in a new series of SSDs known as Optane.
It’s true that some Optane units were present at the latest Intel Developer Forum. It’s also true that Intel did not want to share too many details, and press access was limited to a few isolated images (taken without much permission, to say the least). The folks at Micron (which works alongside Intel on 3D XPoint development) revealed a prototype at the last Flash Memory Summit, which was surrounded by SSDs with outrageous capacities, so it’s hard to understand such secrecy, but the genie will escape the lamp sooner or later. The test system, a beast with 64 gigabytes of DDR4 memory, used the 140 GB Optane module connected via PCI Express 3.0 in what appears to be 4x, as a swap file.
The “benchmark” was the rendering of a scene lasting seven seconds in SideFX Houdini. Under an Intel 750 series SSD (a toy anyone would love to have), the rendering process took 35 hours, and the CPU remained idle 70 percent of that time. When Optane entered the picture, the time dropped to ten hours, and the CPU was idle only 20 percent of the time. The numbers are definitely within what was expected. During the “first half” of the IDF in Shenzhen, Intel crushed an SSD in a data transfer with Optane over Thunderbolt 3, moving two gigabytes per second against the 300 MB/s of the traditional SSD. Two things are certain: We want Optane to become much more than a swap module, and at the start it will cost significantly more than an SSD. Even so, we’ll be waiting.
