Gadgetory

until today announced its first major product on the op tain platform the DC or datacenter P 4800 X this is a data center drive it's not a consumer device you should not buy it as a consumer but it will be using the opt-in platform and 3d crosspoint architecture these are things which will not change as they move toward consumer products probably later this year or maybe sometime next year sometime soon it will happen that's just how these technologies work so we be talking about that today just to get everyone hooked in the device announced today the P 4800 x cost 1520 dollars it's an nvme SSD it is 375 gigabytes and then the software bundle is 1951 dollars that's quite expensive but we're going to go over why in a moment before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by EVGA and their new 1080 TI FTW 3 icx card which will launch within the next few weeks the card uses the new icx NTC thermistors for measurements of temperature across the board learn more in the link below so some housekeeping stuff first obtain the 3d crosspoint and quantex these are all words that we need to kind of define before getting into things obtained is Intel's platform leveraging 3d crosspoint architecture quant X is the micron version of this and Intel and micron worked together to create 3d crosspoint so they are both working on this they both have hands-on they just have different implementations to some extent with Intel's being called obtain that is the platform that's the collection of everything 3d crosspoint is the actual architecture underlying this this was built as a means to solve some trouble in the memory and storage spaces particularly as it pertains to enterprise and data center that's why they're starting here so the basic example the easiest would be to look at something like the New York Stock Exchange you look at a Stock Exchange all they care about is being first just like a lot of YouTube commenters and so they want to be first to make that trade they want to be first to get in the door with whatever transaction they're doing unfortunately storage is not that fast it's gotten a whole lot better with SSDs but memory is still the absolute fastest type of access you can make outside of the CP use cash memory though is not that big and when you get those bigger capacities like the 1 terabyte servers that you could build it's expensive as hell what do you do well you probably throw a ton of SSDs in there and maybe put them in a raid or something like that that's still not great SSDs have a higher latency than memory they're not quite as fast as memory and the upside is they have more storage the cost per gigabyte is far better its non-volatile that has some other advantages potentially what Intel and micron are trying to do is create a middleman device between memory and storage this means that we're looking at something that is going to be faster than SSDs in terms of access times not necessarily the sequential speeds or the random speeds though some exceptions apply but access times and Layton sees will be better but slower than memory overall though you get some of the benefit of extra capacity now that said at 375 gigabytes for 1520 dollars doesn't sounds are great but that's again a data center drive so things are a bit different in that space now another thing the clearway here the interface to talk to opt in is not some new special obtain interface this is not like envy link or anything like that it is using standard interfaces so it can function octane can be deployed in MDOT to devices in DRAM ddr4 sized devices and in a ICS or add-in cards that would be your PCIe gen3 four-lane type of add-on this is going to be interesting going forward because right now all we have today the P 4800 X is a data center drive it's a PCIe drive it plugs into a PCIe slot it functions on nvme at the interface what's different is as things move into memory and until may Sims with obtain or you might have an MDOT to stick using non-volatile effectively memory so that's something that we're interested in in the future but we don't have information on that too much today other than what's already been exposed in the past few months before getting into the technical details just the standard note there's a bigger article in the description below that stone wrote it he focused on all of the detail collection during the press event so you should check that out if you want more of the detail I'll give you most of it as far as starters he's got the rest another note here unfortunately we have a lot of slides and we don't have any b-roll I don't like doing voiceover over a slideshow but we'll be doing some of that because Intel didn't allow any video capture or b-roll of the devices at the press event or the demos even though they already have photos of the same devices online I don't know why they decided to do that but I'll have some slides for you for things where I'm not on camera the data center P 4800 X is the first obtained device announced and is meant for use in servers with Xeon processors and compatible motherboards that would be an e5 V 2 or e 7 v 2 or better the P 4800 X will be broadly available by second half with initial availability starting today again this is a data center drive it's not really meant for anyone in our core audience but we'll talk about it as the same exact technology will be coming to the consumer drives at some point in the future don't have full details on that yet but there will not be an architectural change in a substantial way from data center to consumer it's more or less going to be disabling features that you don't need to drive price down so that means this stuff applies going forward as a consumer the P 4800 X can be used as a supplement to system memory or as storage configurable through Intel memory drive there are limitations to the expansion of the technology most notably system memory expansion is not recommended to exceed eight times the amount of DRAM installed and each 375 gigabyte obtain SSD is only good for 320 gigabytes of a system memory expansion it also appears that only the AIC is usable as system memory not the YouTube version that were still waiting on more information from that obtained is a combination of 3d crosspoint memory media Intel memory and storage controllers Intel interconnect IP and Intel software the 3d crosspoint storage media is a solid-state architecture which is defined in our articles below the memory and storage controllers we're told anyway works similarly to flash and then Daz as the controllers with some notable exceptions that will likely be discussed in detail when we actually have one of these things to review the interconnect IP and Intel software appear to be a combination of in-house developed code and licensed software from a company called scale MP which specializes in virtualization and symmetric multiprocessing allowing for a single piece of software to take advantage of large numbers of aggregate CPUs and massive amounts of shared memory the controllers main job is to interface between nvme and 3d crosspoint media and storage is architected at the byte level so this gives Intel some flexibility with regard to making dims or storage devices in the future when making storage devices they are adapting to a block level so that allows Intel's 3d crosspoint media and opt-in platform to communicate via nvm ease for kilobyte block schema that's important we're not really sure how this is happening just yet those details haven't been disclosed but if we ever find out but in theory we will we'll update you in an article or a video what we were told is that one four kilobyte read is spread across multiple channels per die using the intel's proprietary controller programming we now know that there are a total of 28 thighs spread across a seven channel controller and that controller works best with an even die to channel loading one major difference at the chip level between NAND and 3d crosspoint is the way rights are done in flash nand a cell has to be erased before it can be written again and that means that the controller has to clean up a block at a time for every write this cleaning process is non-existant 3d crosspoint as it has a right in-place design rather than a PE cycle in the way that we are used to with SSDs and that means when I write is requested the cell's properties are just altered not cleared and then altered or rewritten in that case as discussed in the article linked below the read behavior of the cells is electrically similar creating a uniform readwrite behavior that means that both operations should be efficient a final interesting point is that we were told that there is somewhat wear leveling handled by the controller so that specific cells don't die out than others this indicates that there must be some sort of table lookup which means that there could be time added to Layton sees that was about as much detail as Intel was giving us the ho at the chip level these are data center drives you could actually buy one if you wanted to they're not meant for you but you could pick one up they are supposed to deliver on lower latency as stated previously that's more comparable to RAM then to an SSD Layton sees a lot lower here doesn't matter in enthusiast or consumer use cases I don't know we'll see I'm helpfully skeptical about it but for now we know that the enterprise P 4800 X is meant to be better with Layton sees than SSDs and better with endurance than a SSD is capable of sustaining something like 30 total Drive writes per day for three plus years that's that's a lot of read and write cycles so those drives will last a lot longer in theory based on what Intel tells us then the SSD is currently out due so that's an interesting point the latencies are lower reportedly they should average something like 10 microsecond latency on typical reads and writes and Intel has also shared with us information that the drive performs steadily under two gigabyte per second workloads what an opt-in SSD can do that flash and SSDs can't do is increase load and allow the latency to remain the same across that load until saturation of the data bus that's new that said octane is really not built for sequential workloads so if all you do data center user or not is pushed massive sequential files back and forth all day this might not be for you so you might be better off with SSDs for that but in terms of randoms this is where obtained is targeted right now for the drive that we were shown today and then latency is being the bigger item of note so this is just the beginning of octane we don't have a whole lot of information outside of the data center stuff today crosspoint octane have a lot more information out there that we have to dig through you can find the article below if you want more of it as for how much you should be interested in this I'll say the things that we always say which is don't preorder this if you see the P 4800 X and you think that you want it one where did you get your money and to wait for actual reviews of the product it probably won't come from us but look for it from someone else it's not really the place that I specialized in so P 4800 X I'm sure there will be reviews out there look for those before you buy the thing because it's a big expense and it's questionable how much you'll see as a consumer as an everyday user enthusiast or otherwise data center it looks good it looks promising but I am I have reservations about getting too hyped about octane for consumers right now we will see as things progressed and as Intel gives us more information if that changes once we can actually test the thing that would be nice and see how it performs and see if it's actually worthwhile but for today just hold on wait and we'll let you know how it progresses otherwise keep an eye out for P 4100 2x reviews I'm sure someone will do them I don't know that the typical sites you follow will if they're related to us so as always thank you for watching that link in the description below for more information you can go to patreon.com/scishow cameras Nexus 2 helps out directly garrison axis thought net for the articles we have a couple on opt in already one was written at CES we've got a newer one and I'll see you all next time you