Currently Intel is hosting their IDF 2015 in San Francisco, where they're showing a variety of new products and technologies. 3D XPoint, which is going to be called Optane in future is certainly one of the most promising new technologies for the storage sector and Intel was showing a very early prototype live - apparently performing excellently.

During the presentation Intel conducted live performance tests, where they've compared their high-end P3700 SSD, which is NAND-based, to the an early prototype with 3D XPoint technology. The prototype drive as able to outperform the NAND-based derivate by a factor of 7.23, whereas the queue depth was set to 1. In fact while the NAND-based drive scored 10'600 IOPS the 3D XPoint drive managed 76'600 IOPS, which is an insanely high value regarding QD1 test-results.

So far it looks like Intel is going launch the first Optane products 2016. There will be different form factors covering the whole range from Ultrabooks to servers, whereas Xeon-based systems will even benefit from DIMM form factors.

Form what it looks like today, 2016 could become an interesting year regarding storage. With Intel pushing NVMe and now 3D XPoint, there will be SSDs available, which are significantly faster than today's drives, while especially low queue depth performance is going to benefit. And that is exactly where we end-users want to see higher IOPS in order to "feel" a difference.






Source: Anandtech