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Intel Offers More Insight On Its 3D Memory (itworld.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the greased-lightning dept.

itwbennett writes: When Intel and Micron Technology first announced the 3D XPoint memory in July, they promised about 1,000 times the performance of NAND flash, 1,000 times the endurance of NAND flash, and about 10 times the density of DRAM. At OpenWorld last week, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich disclosed a little more information on the new memory, which Intel will sell under the Optane brand, and did a demo on a pair of matching servers running two Oracle benchmarks. One server had Intel's P3700 NAND PCI Express SSD, which is no slouch of a drive. It can perform up to 250,000 IOPS per second. The other was a prototype Optane SSD. The Optane SSD outperformed the P3700 by 4.4 times in IOPS with 6.4 times less latency.

7 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. So which is it? by fnj · · Score: 5, Insightful

    1,000 times the performance, or 6 times the performance? Somebody needs to get the story right with the hyperbole.

    1. Re:So which is it? by pushing-robot · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They claimed the technology had the potential to hit 1000 times faster than current flash memory... they didn't specify when or what flash they were comparing to.

      In any case, this is an early prototype spanking the top of the line current technology. That's impressive in my book.

      --
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    2. Re:So which is it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Amdahl has a lower UID than you do.

    3. Re:So which is it? by funwithBSD · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Even if it is truly 1000x faster, the rest of the architecture is not designed to make full use of it.
      No way any any of the current bus technologies could handle even a 10X improvement to its full extent.

      --
      Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
    4. Re:So which is it? by nojayuk · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If this tech makes it into the marketplace at reasonable prices it's not going to be hanging off SAS-12 cables or any other serial links at that rate, it will be more tightly integrated with the CPU bus to deliver on the R/W and access speed improvements. Even PCI is a possible bottleneck if this 3D flash can deliver what Intel are claiming for it. Comparing its performance to DRAM is a "tell" and shows what they're thinking; this may be the fabled "non-volatile RAM" solution that's been the Holy Grail researchers have been trying to develop pretty much ever since RAM was invented. (Yes, I know there are battery-backed-up RAM solutions that claim to be non-volatile but they're only non-volatile until the battery power runs out).

  2. I'm guessing both. by DumbSwede · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Increasing Memory Speeds 1000x will not lead to a straight 1000x increase in operations. There are undoubtedly other bottles necks in processing. What for instance is the theoretical max throughput of the memory interface used (is it a modified SSD interface)? What CPU overhead is involved? Don't expect your computer to perform 1000x better across the board just because one component is 1000x faster.

    --
    Letter To Iran
  3. Re:6.4 Times Less Latency by harrkev · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think they mean that the old way takes 6.4 times as long as their newest toy.

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