Intel finally announces the unforgettable Optane: DDR4 memory
Since Intel and Micron announced XPoint 3D memory in 2015, the world has been waiting for companies to use it to make memory sticks.
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| stick of Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. |
3D XPoint combines the properties of flash storage and DRAM memory. Like flash, it persists, retaining its value even when the system is turned off, and it’s solid, with about 10 times the density of DRAM. Like DRAM, it supports low-latency random access. Intel also claims that its write endurance is much better than flash.
This combination of features creates the prospect of memory sticks that look like DIMMs and appear to the system as if they were DDR4 RAM but with much greater capacity and with persistence: data written to “RAM” is permanently preserved. Memory with this property is attractive to a wide variety of applications — for example, databases that no longer need to concern themselves with data back to disk — and may someday provoke significant changes in the way operating systems and software are designed.
But while persistent memory is probably the most attractive application of XPoint 3D, the first products to hit the market were simply storage drives using “Optane” as their branding. There is a range of drives for enterprise customers and several consumer-oriented M.2 sticks designed to pair with spinning disks to produce high-speed hybrids. While 3D XPoint does offer some benefits over SSD flash — in particular, significantly lower drive latency compared to comparable flash units, and I/O performance is maintained even under heavy read/write workloads — it’s not quite the revolution we hoped for. .
No longer. Today, Intel announced the Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. This is a series of DDR4 memory sticks (with capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB) that use 3D XPoint instead of traditional DRAM cells. Results? Latency is slightly worse than DDR 4 actually, but sticks are there anyway. Even though they use the standard DDR4 form factor, they will only be supported on Intel’s generation Xeon generation.
Intel is rolling out new memory as a way to increase the amount of memory available to the processor and eliminate the latency that typically occurs when moving data from memory to persistent storage. This is valuable for various workloads such as databases and caching. Persistence means that a freshly booted server no longer needs to load terabytes of data into memory — the data already exists. Since persistent memory has major implications for software developers, Intel will also have a scheme that gives developers (under NDA) remote access to machines using Optane Persistent Memory so they can develop and test software that takes advantage of its persistent capabilities. continuously.
Beyond this basic information, there’s still a lot we don’t know about Optane DC Persistent Memory: performance, durability, power consumption, system/processor compatibility — all remaining unknown at this point. Intel is also sketchy on product availability: wide availability will happen sometime in 2022, but select customers will be able to get it later this year.
