tech2 News Staff

The Intel Developer Forum is underway and Intel has given a new name to its partnership with Micron over 3D XPoint memory/storage technology - Optane. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced that the memory storage combination would launch under the Intel Optane Technology brand name in 2016.

Krzanich announced that the 3D XPoint technology will be seen across platforms going from data centres, all the way down to Ultrabooks. The Optane technology will be available in both DIMM and SSD form factors.

The 3D Xpoint memory technology is as much as 1,000 times faster and 1,000 times more enduring than NAND, a popular non-volatile memory used in computers, and 10 times denser than what is typically used in machine when it comes to packing in data, according to the companies.

Intel had set up an on-stage benchmarking of an early SSD prototype of 3D Xpoint technology against the Intel SSD P3700 series. The XPoint gave around 76,600 IOPS against 10,600 IOPS on the P3700 SSD (Intel's current non volatile memory over PCIe interface which is its flagship SSDs at the moment) for a read queue depth of 1. This is an almost 7x improvement in performance.

Earlier at the announcement of 3D Xpoint partnership with Intel, Micron president Mark Adams had said, "This new class of non-volatile memory is a revolutionary technology that allows for quick access to enormous data sets and enables entirely new applications.”

According to Intel and Micron, the immediate application of XPoint memory will be seen in areas such as rich media, high-performance computing, immersive gaming, healthcare, and other emerging fields. With the internet of things there is will be many more products generating massive amounts of new data that must be stored and analysed quickly.

Intel's senior vice president Rob Crooke has said that the new class of non-volatile memory will bring in some game-changing performance improvements to memory and storage solutions.