At IDF 2015 this year Intel has announced that their forthcoming 3D XPoint technology based products will be sold under a new brand for the company, Optane.

The Optane products will be available in 2016, in both standard SSD (PCIe) form factors for everything from Ultrabooks to servers, and in a DIMM form factor for Xeon systems for even greater bandwidth and lower latencies.  As expected, Intel will be providing storage controllers optimized for the 3D XPoint memory, though no further details on that subject matter were provided. This announcement is in-line with Intel and Micron’s original 3D XPoint announcement last month, which also announced that 3D XPoint would be out in 2016.

Finally, as part of the Optane announcement, Intel also gave the world’s first live 3D XPoint demonstration. In a system with an Optane PCIe SSD, Intel ran a quick set of live IOps benchmarks comparing the Optane SSD to their high-end P3700 SSD. The Optane SSD offered better than 5x the IOps of the P3700 SSD, with that lead growing to more than 7x at a queue depth of 1, a client-like workload where massive arrays of NAND like the P3700 traditionally struggle to achieve maximum performance.

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  • Memo.Ray - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link

    How much do we pay to "obtain" one of these?!
  • icrf - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link

    I hope not enterprise-only price points. I was looking at one of the NVME Samsung M.2 drives this fall, but if this is early next year and will have something at similar capacities at, say, a 50% premium, I think I'd jump on it.
  • Impulses - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link

    That would make it what, $300 for 256GB & $600 for 512GB? No clue if that's optimistic or not... There might be extra costs if this ends up requiring new motherboards etc, there's so little details to go on. Hopefully they have U.2 versions like the 750 tho...
  • lilmoe - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link

    For a boot M.2 NVMe drive, I'd gladly pay $200-300 for 128GB with that speed and RELIABILITY. Would be great in addition to a couple of Samsung 1TB 3D TLC SATA drives (on sale hopefully) in RAID 1 for storing the rest of my important files.

    I'm seriously considering a Thinkpad P50/70 early next year. ^^These drives will be the icing on the delicious sweat cake.
  • Amoro - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link

    Sweat cake? Gross.
  • lilmoe - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link

    victim of the edit button
  • aakash_sin - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link

    Haha!
  • Wardrop - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link

    Haha
  • melgross - Wednesday, August 19, 2015 - link

    Maybe we shouldn't be talking about pricing yet? They had said that these would be expensive in the beginning, and for enterprise use. I believe that. I've also read that they said that it wouldn't be priced anywhere near consumer drives for years.

    This is a completely new technology, and we all know what that means in terms of pricing.
  • nandnandnand - Tuesday, August 18, 2015 - link

    A good starting point for XPoint is a 16/32 GB M.2 drive for laptops to hold OS and applications.

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