A new type of non-volatile memory that was recently announced by Intel and Micron, the 3D XPoint, promises significant improvements for solid-state drives (SSDs) but it appears that such performance will not happen overnight as, according to Intel, first-gen 3D XPoint devices will be limited by interface.

Recently announced as Octane SSDs, the first SSDs powered by 3D XPoint memory will be used for storing hot data and require high bandwidth, low latency and high IOPS performance. According to Intel's recent announcement, Octane SSDs will be based on PCI-Express 3.0 or DDR4 interface and be available in PCIe card or DIMM form-factors.




Aimed to be used with existing servers, PCI-Express 3.0 x4 will be able to offer bandwidth of up to 4GB/s. Intel's upcoming Xeon E5 v4 "Broadwell-EP" CPU will offer up to 22 cores and support DDR4-2400 memory, and thus offer up to 19.2GB/s of bandwidth. The NVDIMM form-factor with 3D XPoint could reach such bandwidth but it is not something that Intel wants to confirm so far. Intel did note during IDF 2015 show that 3D XPoint based NVDIMMs will offer around 6GB/s of bandwidth.

Intel still needs to work with JEDEC in order to make a proper standard to ensure compatibility between new SSDs and platforms so it is possible that we might see higher bandwidth NVDIMMs once these hit the market.

Intel and Micron have promised significant gains when it comes to SSD performance and we are certainly looking forward to it.



Source: Kitguru.net.