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Leaked: Intel's Optane-based SSDs may be launched by the end of this year

By Wong Chung Wee - on 15 Jun 2016, 3:18pm

Leaked: Intel's Optane-based SSDs may be launched by the end of this year

In August last year at IDF15, Intel announced its high-endurance, high-performance Octane-based SSDs. Now, there are rumors that these SSDs will be launched by the end of this year. Also, the SSDs may be made available alongside Kaby Lake processors. For a quick recap, the Intel Octane technology is based on the company’s based on 3D XPoint memory; in a nutshell, “3D XPoint contains both elements of NAND and DRAM memory, but is non-volatile, meaning data is not lost when power is switched off. Additionally, it also means that the memory does not need to keep refreshing itself to retain data. This can help reduce power consumption.” At IDF15, the immediate advantage of these Octane-based SSDs is the performance boosts of about 7 times for IOPS performance; however, do note that this test was performed with an I/O queue depth of one.

(Image source: BenchLife.info)

The leaked roadmap shows three Octane-based SSD; with ‘Stony Beach’ series released as some form of system acceleration product, and for the enthusiast workstation market segment, there are ‘Brighton Beach’ and ‘Mansion Beach’ NVMe SSDs that use the PCIe Gen 3.0 x2 and PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 interfaces respectively. One more thing, according to the roadmap, the Octane SSDs will be launched alongside the 14nm Intel ‘Kaby Lake’ CPUs. The 7th generation processors are the successors to the current “Skylake” CPU family. In the recently concluded Computex 2016, we came across the ASUS Transformer 3 that is powered by the mobile version of the new Intel ‘Kaby Lake’ CPU. Therefore, by the end of this year, we may see the new 3D XPoint enterprise-level SSDs as well as new devices on the ‘Kaby Lake’ platform.

(Source: BenchLife.info via MyCE.com)

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