3D XPoint Storage On The Way

[SteelCrysis]

http://techreport.com/news/31932/optane-...ve-in-2018

Intel's Optane Memory tech showcases what 3D Xpoint memory can do on a limited scale, but the potential for Optane extends well beyond hard-drive acceleration. Intel began shipping Optane DIMMs to partners for testing early this year, and yesterday the company committed to delivering Optane DIMMs as a product called "Intel persistent memory" alongside a refresh of its Xeon Processor Scalable family called Cascade Lake. Both the persistent memory product and Cascade Lake CPUs will arrive sometime in 2018.

Intel says that Optane DIMMs will upend the traditional "small, volatile, and expensive" view of system memory by providing a much denser and persistent way of putting data close to the processor, all at lower prices than DRAM. The company showed off these potential benefits at the SAP Sapphire conference by running the ERP giant's HANA analytics tool on a pool of Optane DIMMs. Intel says that for in-memory database apps like HANA, these DIMMs will be a no-brainer for improving performance because of the much larger data sets they'll put closer to CPUs.