As was mentioned recently on Gestalt IT, Intel and Micron have recently announced they are dissolving their partnership over the 3D XPoint technology. Thus far, the technology has not nearly lived up to the lofty expectations crafted by Intel’s marketing and this has shown in its sales.
Intel has now, however, introduced the second generation of their Optane Memory products, which are low-capacity M.2 NVMe SSDs that implement the 3D XPoint technology for use as cache devices. Though it won’t fix all the problems with 3D XPoint, the new Optane Memory is an opportunity to show it has a viable use case.
Robert Novak decided to experiment with Optane Memory and run some tests using it with the Intel NUC 7th generation PC. The tests clearly showed an increase in disk i/o performance, but it would still be outshone by a good 1 TB SSD, for example. Of course, as Robert points out, these benchmarks should be taken with a grain of salt, but it does not seem to promising for Optane.
So in the end, it seems Optane is just passable. It works well enough to be considered an option, but is nowhere near revolutionary. This means that it will be interesting to look forward to the other ways in which Intel implements 3D XPoint, especially in the enterprise, in the future.
Read more at: Experimenting with Intel Optane at home with the Intel NUC 7th Generation PC
