Intel Optane SSDs Coming in 2016 w/ 3D XPoint – Shown to Be Over 5x Faster Than Current SSDs

At this morning IDF 2015 opening keynote presentation Intel announced Optane Technology using 3D XPoint non-volatile memory media as being the next breakthrough for the storage industry. Intel Optane technology will be coming to market in 2016 in a new line of high-endurance, high-performance Intel SSDs. The new class of memory technology will also power a new line of Intel DIMMs designed for Intel’s next-generation data center platforms.

During the Inte Optane technology introdution Rob Crooke, Senior Vice President General Manager, Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, took to the stage and was able to show the first live public demo of an early Intel Optane SSD using Intel 3D XPoint memory.

Using IOMeter he showed that the 3D Xpoint powered SSD with the an advanced system memory controller was able to perform 5.34x faster than an Intel SSD DC P3700 Series SSD. Capacities of the drives were not given, but the test was done with a 70/30 read/write mix at a queue depth of one. The P3700 Series SSD had 14,500 IOPS and the prototype drive had 77,500 IOPS. Intel believes this is an example of how 3D XPoint has the ability to greatly improve the performance of upcoming storage products.

The early SSD prototype with 3D Xpoint technology had over 461,000 IOPS random read at QD8 versus 84,600 IOPS on the Intel SSD DC P3700 Series drive.