Intel announced it will roll out its new 3D XPoint memory standard in SSDs under the brand name Optane.
The new category of non-volatile memory technology was unveiled in July, and Intel claimed it to be a “revolutionary breakthrough” in the industry. However, at that stage little was known about the technology, or when it would arrive and in what form.
Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced during a keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco that the new memory class will arrive in solid state drives (SSDs) under the brand name Optane.
Krzanich said that Optane SSDs offer five to seven times performance increases over Intel’s current NAND flash products, and will ship in products ranging from servers to low-power laptops from as early as next year.
The 3D XPoint technology is described as faster and denser than any other class of memory, and 1,000 times faster than the NAND architecture featured in most flash memory cards and SSDs. 3D XPoint co-developed with Micron.
The technology comprises a transistor-less cross-point architecture, hence the name. This creates a 3D ‘checkerboard’ where memory cells sit at the intersection of word lines and bit lines, allowing the cells to be addressed individually. It means that the data can be written and read in small sizes, leading to faster and more efficient read/write processes.
