Skip to main content

Arrival of Intel’s XPoint-supporting Optane drives could be a game changer

Whether you are aware of XPoint technology or are just hearing about it for the first time, trust us, you’ll want to know when it lands. It has the potential to make the solid state drives (SSD) of today look like the hard drives of a decade past, and thanks to a leaked Intel slide, it looks like some of the first supporting drives will be arriving in early 2017.

The reason XPoint has everyone excited is because it is slated as being comparable in performance to DRAM — and yet is non-volatile, so can store data even when not powered on, like flash memory. It’s also said to be far more dense than DRAM, meaning it will easily outsize RAM disks, and it’s very durable, meaning you should be able to write to it for a long, long time before seeing performance degradation.

Recommended Videos

Although much of this is theoretical until we see more of it, Intel has demonstrated a file transfer as fast as 2GB per second.

So the fact that we now know that the first product from that Optane (XPoint) storage line could be arriving in Q1 2017 — well, that’s very exciting.

The slide gives us a little more detail too, giving us the code name of the new drives as “Mansion Beach” and “Brighton Beach.” They are both Optane SSDs that utilize PCIExpress 3 x4 and x2 ports, respectively. As part of the “Enthusiast workstation” range, we would expect prices on those drives to be quite steep initially, much like the Intel SSD 750 series.

What may be more exciting for those of us without thousands of dollars to throw at new hardware, though, is the Stony Beach “system acceleration” that the slide also details. It claims to use “Intel Optane Memory,” and uses the PCIExpress 3 x2 (or M.2.) ports. PCPer has speculated that this could act a little like a caching drive for today’s SSDs, much in the way those same drives can cache for hard drives in hybrid storage solutions.

That may be the way most of us get our first taste of XPoint, and if it works in a similar manner to the hybrid drives we have now, it should give everyone a much more affordable taste of what sort of speed Optane drives can offer.

Moving further along the slide, we can see that once we move beyond the Kaby Lake platform that Intel is still currently working on, we have refreshes of the Mansion and Carson Beach hardware as they ultimately improve over time.

Although undated, we will also see second generations of 3DNand storage for PCIEexpress and SATA connections sometime in the future.

Jon Martindale
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jon Martindale is a freelance evergreen writer and occasional section coordinator, covering how to guides, best-of lists, and…
Game developer calls Intel flagship CPUs ‘defective’
Intel Core i9-13900K held between fingertips.

When it rains, it pours, at least for Intel -- or rather, its customers. As first reported in February, Intel's best CPUs have been crashing for months now, and the uproar that was previously limited to gamers is now spreading like wildfire to data centers and game studios. This time, Alderon Games, the studio behind Path of Titans, made a strong statement about the problem. The studio claims that Intel's 13th and 14th-gen CPUs have a "nearly 100%" failure rate, and as a result, Alderon Games is switching all of its servers to AMD.

Alderon Games didn't mince words in its statement, making it clear that there's something wrong with Intel's latest desktop processors. While mostly associated with consumer PCs, these CPUs are powerful enough to run game servers, too, and the lack of a fix over the last few months has become a problem for the company. Matthew Cassells, the founder of Alderon Games, mentioned issues such as crashes, instability, and corrupted SSDs and memory, with all of them only occurring on Intel's 13th and 14th-gen CPUs. Installing new BIOS and firmware updates didn't solve the problem.

Read more
Game dev on Intel’s unstable CPUs: ‘I might lose over $100K’
Intel's 14900K CPU socketed in a motherboard.

Intel's best processors have been crashing for months, and despite many attempts, the issue is nowhere near being fixed. In fact, the impact might be far worse than we thought.

Original reports about stability issues with the Core i9-13900K and the Core i9-14900K came from PC gamers, but now, we're hearing that they're crashing in servers, too. That can lead to serious damage, with one game dev estimating the instability may cost them up to $100K in lost players.

Read more
I was wrong — Nvidia’s AI NPCs could be a game changer
A character in an AI-driven dialogue tree by Nvidia.

I wasn’t a fan of the Covert Protocol demo that Nvidia showed me on a video call late last week. The short mystery demo features a handful of NPCs that are directed entirely by AI. There’s a door greeter, an executive waiting for a room, and a receptionist -- and all three featured what were, on the surface, bland dialogue trees generated with AI.

At GDC 2024, trying out the demo myself, I was converted.

Read more