Gadgetory

intel sponsored our trip down to their campus and full from California where we will be taking an exclusive look at the latest breakthrough in some super awesome cool tech that they're calling their Intel octane technology based on 3d crosspoint memory media and all this was taking place in advance of you normal consumers being able to buy right now I think about it that that sounds an awful lot like all the other coverage of this stuff but know the difference this time is that an octane memory module like the one I'm holding in my hand will be available for purchase in about a month for 50 bucks ok so what is an optin memory module here's a Cliff's Notes DRAM is the super fast storage that holds the data that's integral to whatever it is your system is doing at a given moment so when you go to launch a web browser or a game a simulation data set or video editing program whatever that is where everything gets kept so that the program runs smoothly so that's great right let's just put let's just put everything in there right wrong wrong wrong wrong the RAM has two major limitations the first of which being that DRAM is very expensive you probably have less than a tenth as much DRAM in your system as you have other types of storage and number two is that DRAM is what's known as volatile so that means when the system loses power poof the data is gone so that is why we have what's known as non-volatile storage so this is where your pictures or files or anything that you don't want to disappear every time you turn off your computer goes and the most common types of non-volatile storage in order of speed are the hard disk drive or HDD the solid-state disk or SSD with SATA interface or more recently an nvme SSD like the 750 series right here getting back to obtain those 3d crosspoint memory is unlike anything we've ever seen before at a die level both its performance and endurance exceed even the NAND used in the highest-end FFTs today and perhaps even more importantly it has only ten times the access latency as B RAM meaning that it can be used as more of an extension of system memory or like a fifth level of CPU cache and it can do that without worrying about the write cycle limitations or long systems stutters for delays that would be associated with grabbing data off of a more traditional storage device and the real kicker then is this it does all of this stuff while being non-volatile the data stays there so here is a normal computer Intel did provide it but I have checked no monkey business 7700 k au z 278 they got a water cooler on there that herp a derp with the RAM spacing there it's got one fan on it and you got a here's that GTX 1080 and 3 terabyte WD blue hard drive so in summary then this small 16 or 32 gig stick sits somewhere between your ddr4 Ram and your mechanical hard drive so I'm thinking kind of there but no not really acting as a way faster data cache allowing application launch times and system responsiveness up to several times faster and this time Intel claim although we've all heard this before that it's easy so let's try it out then shall we oh action roll here we go and here's the performance of a normal computer if you can call it that I mean I'm not just talking boot time like click on things how long you wait well okay so now we're going to put in the Intel obtain memory module let's shut this baby down eventually at this time that requires a seventh generation Core series processor and a 200 series desktop motherboard you find an available m dot 2 slot so here's where's actually 2 on this motherboard screw it in and Boop there it is about 3.7 gigabytes per second of theoretical bandwidth to our memory how awkward looks like there's no button finally we reboot and we're actually going to be measuring this even though we are not expecting there to be any significant difference in boot time since the obtain memory module hasn't had a chance to catch anything yet and hypothesis confirmed it is marginally faster but there's also significant variance once you factor in waiting for all this crap to load up when you boot up windows and for that matter this is true for everything we ran after initially installing the obtain memory module on the second run now we're talking here octane is starting to flex its muscles a little bit game loading times are not affected as much but boot times and application load times are noticeably snappier for our third run ignoring the margin of error inherent and relying on my fingers to press the stopwatch overall the results look pretty darn similar to the third and still very good so that was really cool but with that said I don't think anybody at Intel is trying to convince the enthusiasts user who wants to give them $700 for a 1.2 terabyte nvme SSD to throw that junk in the garbage and run out and buy a big old hard drive and strap a 16 or 32 gig octane module to it instead no I think the pitch here is that in a typical consumer workload the octane module can hold enough of the operating system and program data to achieve SSD like responsiveness at a lower cost without manually using frequently used data around like many users we have SSD boot drives and HDD storage drives have to deal with today so this tech was already capable of measurable noticeable improvements to system responsiveness back when it was called SRT and it used slower lower endurance NAND flash in order to accelerate the computing experience so what we're looking at now then is a way for Intel to take everything that they learned about intelligently caching data for the user and give it the low latency high endurance and simplicity that it always I guess needed to really shine so a huge shout out to Intel for sponsoring this video bringing us down here to exclusively bring you this hands-on experience with their octane memory module thanks to you guys for watching and as always if you just liked the video you know what to do but if you liked it hit that like button get subscribed leave a comment letting me know what do you guys think of this would you use octane to accelerate a boot volume would you use it to accelerate even a secondary storage volume what do you want to see this technology and cuz I can tell you this is not the last we've seen of it and finally check out at the link in the video description where to buy the stuff we featured our merch store and our community forum LC is later