New Optane Dc Persistent Memory

Have Memory Problems?

Not Now

RAM RAM RAM!!! It’s the voice of computer enthusiast, video editors and gamers for over a decade now, but still, we don’t have the solution, well until now!! Intel this week released a new venture of it's “OPTANE” memory that can be directly plugged in the “DIMM” slots natively. But is the use of it does the system support it? Does it have any real life application or its just another piece of crap that Intel is shitting on the community for the promise of better performance, are the most common questions that were raised.

But first, we have to understand what the background of “OPTANE” and how it's planning to help its big brother RAM.

OPTANE

Announced in mid-June 2016 and introduced as “NVME” drives in 2017 Intel’s OPTANE memory was a sweet spot between RAM and our HARD-DISK. Intel advertised it as 3D X(cross) Point technology keep the actual materials and circuitry a secret. Well, whatever it was claiming was actually the Intel OPTANE were much faster than all the SSD drives that we used today but it has its applications limited due to saturation of the memory bus that we have installed in our motherboards. Intel claimed and verified iOPS of up to 100,000 at a Queue depth of 1 and 400,000 at a Queue depth of 8 (iOPS input-output per second).

Wow!! that is impressive you may think though it was tested with XEON processor so it was not for normal daily users Intel released 16gb and 32gb variants of OPTANE tell that it would result in better caching which actually worked but it was not much of a variation. With the high price and very minimal results, it was only recommended for power users who had their memory space cramped up by the software like ADOBE and other RAM-hungry processes.

OPTANE NOW

Intel now released “OPTANE DC PERSISTENT MEMORY” for what it is claiming to be a cheaper, large capacity memory module. The “OPTANE DC PERSISTENT MEMORY” is a native DIMM memory module that fits with the RAM module in the motherboard boards. Though it has a significant difference to RAM as its claimed to non-volatile in nature and with huge memory spaces as 128gb, 256gb and a 512gb variant to be manufactured in the run the run. Though it sits beside the ram it has lower latency than it but much higher than that of a traditional “SSD”, well don’t be excited though as the module are now only made for datacenters claiming to increase iOPS by a factor of 9.4 with 11 times as many users. Another advantage of the module that the data that it's storing it will be encrypted by built-in hardware mechanisms. But INTEL also stated that the broad availability of the product will be in 2019.

It seems that the new drift is here and soon we will have “OPTANE” DIMM modules for our pc too.

So this was today’s tech am your host Abhishek signing off. If you liked the article the subscribe and follow me for receiving further updates.