Read an article the other day in Ars Technica (Specs for 1st Intel 3DX SSD…) about a preview of the Intel Octane specs for their 375GB 3D Xpoint (3DX) flash card. The device is NVMe compliant, PCIe Gen3 add in card, that’s in a half height, half length, low profile form factor.
Intel’s Optane SSD vs. the competition
A couple of items from the Intel Optane spec sheet of interest to me as a storage guru:
- 30 Drive writes per day/12.3 PBW (written) – 3DX, at launch, had advertised that it would have 1000 times the endurance of (2D-MLC?) NAND. Current flash cards (see Samsung SSD PRO NVMe 256GB Flash card specs) offer about 200TBW (for 256GB card) or 400TBW (for 512GB card). The Samsung PRO is based on 3D (V-)NAND, so its endurance is much better than 2D-MLC at these densities. That being said, the Octane drive is still ~40X the write endurance of the PRO 950. Not quite 1000 but certainly significantly better.
- Sequential (bandwidth) performance (R/W) of 2400/2000 MB/sec – 3DX advertised 1000 times the performance of (2D-MLC, non-NVMe?) NAND. Current 3D (V-)NAND cards (see Samsung SSD PRO above) above offers (R/W) 2200/900 MB/sec for an NVMe device. The Optane’s read bandwidth is a slight improvement but the write bandwidth is a 2.2X improvement over current competitive devices.
- Random 4KB IOPs performance (R/W) of 550K/500K – Similar to the previous bulleted item, 3DX advertised 1000 times the performance of (2D-MLC, non-NVMe?) NAND. Current 3D (V-)NAND cards like the Samsung SSD PRO offer Random 4KB IOPs performance (R/W) of 270K/85K IOPS (@4 threads). Optane’s read random 4KB IOPs performance is 2X the PRO 950 but its write performance is ~5.9X better.
- IO latency of <10 µsec. – 3DX advertised 10X better latency than the current (2D-MLC, non-NVMe) flash drives. According to storage review
(Samsung 950 Pro M.2), the Samsung PRO 950 had a latency of ~22 µsec. Optane has at least 2X better latency than the current competition. - Density 375GB/HH-HL-LP – 3DX advertised 1000X the density of (then current DRAM). Today Micron offers a 4GiB DDR4/288 pin DIMM which is probably 1/2 the size of the HH flash drive. So maybe in the same space this could be 8GiB. This says that the Optane is about 100X denser than today’s DRAM.
Please note, when 3DX was launched, ~2 years ago, the then current NAND technology was 2D-MLC and NVMe was just a dream. So comparing launch claims against today’s current 3D-NAND, NVMe drives is not a fair comparison.
Nevertheless, the Optane SSD performs considerably better than current competitive NVMe drives and has significantly better endurance than current 3D (V-)NAND flash drives. All of which is a great step in the right direction.
What about DRAM replacement?
At launch, 3DX was also touted as a higher density, potential replacement for DRAM. But so far we haven’t seen any specs for what 3DX NVM looks like on a memory bus. It has much better density than DRAM, but we would need to see 3DX memory access times under 50ns to have a future as a DRAM replacement. Optane’s NVMe SSD at 10 µsec. is about 200X too slow, but then again it’s not a memory device configuration nor is it attached to a memory bus.
Comments?
Photo Credit(s): Intel Optane Spec sheet from Ars Technica Article, DDR4 DRAM from Wikimedia user:Dsimic
