Stefan Mileschin

As part of Intel's Architecture Day 2020 presentations, Raja Koduri spent a bit of time talking about the status of their Optane products. Most of it was a recapitulation of details Intel has previously shared. The two important Optane product updates planned for this year are the Barlow Pass second-generation Optane DC Persistent Memory Modules (DCPMM) and the Alder Stream second-generation Optane NVMe SSDs.

Intel has been teasing their Alder Stream second-generation Optane SSDs since last fall, with promises of off-the-charts performance increases. They've confirmed that Alder Stream will be using second-generation 3D XPoint memory, which moves from two to four layers ("decks" in Intel's slides), making this the first test of the vertical scaling potential of 3D XPoint technology. This combined with with a new SSD controller supporting PCIe 4.0 will enable "multiple millions" of IOPS, more than doubling the throughput of current Optane SSDs. Raja also mentioned that they've made optimizations to single-sector reads, so 4kB QD1 random read latency should be improved a bit as well—but this latency is already substantially limited by the latency of PCIe and NVMe command processing.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15972...on-optane-ssds