Gadgetory

look at this new SSD from Intel it's called the SSD DCP 4800 X it has a whopping 375 gigabyte capacity and it only costs one thousand five hundred and twenty US dollars MSRP this is an enterprise device made for data centers and server arrays if the catchy name and crazy high price didn't tip you off but it's also the first commercially available product to release featuring Intel 3d crosspoint technology the new method of storing and recalling bits of data in a solid-state drive Intel products with 3d crosspoint as well as Intel controllers and software will be part of a family of products called octane so for those of you who don't get really excited about new SSD technology here's what I'm going to do start off with some details on the underlying technology 3d crosspoint then some specifics about the DCP 4800 X that's releasing today with wide availability in the second half of 2017 and then I'll close with some discussion about future possibilities for obtain products especially if you're wondering how this might affect you if you're a home builder of desktop PCs for gaming and other stuff that doesn't involve a data center so 3d crosspoint has been in the works for a long time eight plus years because storage is slow even with SSDs that are much much faster than mechanical hard drives your permanent non-volatile storage is still the slowest part of your computer if you consider a manned package for example the little rectangles on your SSDs PCB that actually store the data a 3d crosspoint package would look roughly the same and perform the same basic function of remembering the ones and zeros that make up your operating system files or your mp3 collection 3d crosspoint uses completely different technology than manned internally though and although intel won't tell us the trade secrets like what metals are using and why they went with a Green Bay Packers color scheme you can get the general idea that 3d means it's 3d stackable and crosspoint means the intersecting traces that you can see here in gray can access the data cells that are shown in yellow and green to either store a bit or read a bit of data from each cell this means that the data stored where 3d crosspoint is accessible at a granular level you can access or store data down to the word or bit line as opposed to accessing a byte at a time like RAM does or typically four kilobyte pages like and flash does the upshot is that at the 3d crosspoint ship level performance versus NAND is a thousand times faster with a thousand times the endurance and it's also about ten times denser than DRAM unfortunately this raw performance is somewhat hamstrung because these 3d crosspoint chips still must integrate seamlessly with existing computer technology so we're limited by existing standards bus speeds and the expectation that the operating systems have when it comes to how data storage will work so for now obtain devices with 3d crosspoint will still use byte level access methods like randos this level of granularity does mean that octane drives can do away with the program erase cycles that NAND based SSDs rely on because man based SSDs must rewrite a block at a time also that means no need for trim or defrag messing with 3d crosspoint as the data can be written in place just update a cell state rather than deleting it and rewriting it also if you're wondering the 3d crosspoint chips they're currently producing pack 128 gigabytes of storage per die and are manufactured on 20 nanometer lithography the SSD DCP 4800 X will debut as a 375 gigabyte SSD with a PCI Express gen3 by 4 interface and will still use the nvm the interface specification so it can drop into any system that supports those specs yes even an AMD system although Intel understandably won't be validating risings compatibility 375 gig adding card version shown here is available in limited quantities as of today March 19th with broad availability in the second half of this year at 1520 dollars a 750 gig version else also coming in q2 and a 1.5 terabyte version launches in the second half no word on pricing for those yet Intel is also prepping a 2.5 inch you to drive the 375 gig version of that one arrives in q2 750 gig and 1.5 terabyte versions are expected again in the second half if you're using a V on platform 4 1951 dollars you can get a software and hardware bundle the P 4800 X with Intel memory drive technology this is an example of a different implementation of an op tain drive aside from just using it as draw storage memory drive technology is soft it will function as a middleware layer between the drive and your operating system booting prior to the OS and integrating the P 4800 x transparently with system memory Intel says up to eight times the amount of system memory can be allocated via opt in drive so in theory you could go from like 128 gigs of system ram on a server up to like a terabyte by pairing that with opting which would be huge for handling large data sets required by certain applications such as transaction processing simulations ai and even in certain situations gaming early P 4800 X units from Intel's early development program will have a three year warranty and wide launch products will have a five year warranty so what does all this actually mean to you it doesn't mean you should run out and grab a p40 800 X for your gaming rig hopefully that is clear given the price and how many times I've said data centers in fact that DC and the name stands for data center but this technology will be coming to quiet devices that's you know standard at home users like you and me in the future and hopefully they will also be more affordable as a standalone drive the p40 hundred x excelled in responsiveness and I ops performance input output operations per second handling huge amounts of requests for small chunks of data at least according to intel's benchmarks which show that even when counting the drive was between one hundred and seven hundred and fifty megabytes per second a random writes the latency still hovers around zero the p 4800 x in this chart is that orange line down at the bottom right by zero by the way low queue depth performances also vastly improved most SSD synthetic tests like i've run these myself artificially load up the SSD to a queue depth of 32 or beyond which is a great way to show what a drive can do but it's impractical considering that most use case scenarios will never go beyond a queue depth of maybe four or five the p40 800 x can hit a hundred thousand I offset queue depth one and 300k a queue depth five Intel was also using mixed tests with 70% reads and thirty percent rates with minimal latency reduction and crazy good quality of service meaning that even the slowest latency is recorded for each transaction that the drivers performing are still very fast which is sure to catch the eye of the IT crowd out there oh and also listed endurance is there drive rates per day over the entire capacity of the SSD within its warranty which for SSD is absolutely insane and Intel is usually pretty conservative with like endurance numbers so that's impressive too all things considered the P 4800 X seems poised to revolutionize data center storage whether you need all those eye offs best-in-class quality of service or your website's load faster or crazy-good endurance but these use cases again aren't as much use to most of you who watch my channel also bear in mind that these sequential reads and writes that your standard NAND based SSDs like to tout like 500 megabytes per second or whatnot are not obtains Forte or at least we assume that because Intel didn't show sequential read and write performance at all I look forward to the consumer versions of these drives though and I hope we'll have access to some variant of the Intel memory drive technology so we can trick our system into thinking that the opt-in Drive is system memory for video editing I could imagine all my 4k footage sitting in system memory for stutter free timeline scrubbing for gaming I could imagine massive open world simulations with really high resolution textures and pretty much zero draw distance limitations remember most developers design games to work across a variety of PC configurations often assuming that there's only going to be four or eight gigs of system memory to work with and even less vram I might also imagine Intel partnering with a well-known game studio to leverage obtained technology and a highly anticipated upcoming title but sometimes my imagination gets the better of me that would be a pretty cool way to show it off though anyway let me know what you guys can come up with as far as more ideas for how faster storage with minimal latency could help out on the desktop side of the PC space make sure to hit that like button on your way out links to some stuff is down in the description thanks for watching guys and we'll see you next time