Intel Introduces the First 3D XPoint Based SSD, the DC P4800X

[DocSwag]

 

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11208/intel-introduces-optane-ssd-dc-p4800x-with-3d-xpoint-memory

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A year and a half after first publicly unveiling their new 3D XPoint non-volatile memory technology, Intel is launching the first product incorporating the new memory. The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X is an enterprise PCIe 3 x4 NVMe SSD that Intel promises will be the the most responsive data center SSD with lower latency than all of the fastest NAND flash based competitors. After months of touting 3D XPoint memory primarily with rough order of magnitude claims about its performance, endurance and cost relative to DRAM and NAND flash, and after some unexplained delays, Intel is finally providing some concrete specifications and pricing for a complete SSD that is shipping today. The information is more limited than we're accustomed to for their NAND flash SSDs, and Intel still isn't confirming anything about the materials or exact operating principle of the 3D XPoint memory cell.

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The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X is rated for a typical read or write latency under 10µs, compared to tens of microseconds for the best NAND flash based SSDs, and about 4µs minimum imposed by PCIe and NVMe transaction overhead. More impressive is how little latency degrades under less than ideal conditions. Queue depth 1 random reads are rated to remain below 30µs even while the drive is simultaneously accepting 2GB/s of sustained random writes (about 500k IOPS). Intel even specifies Quality of Service (QoS) standards for latency at the 99.999th percentile, with even QD16 random writes staying almost entirely below 200µs. A consequence of the low latency is that the P4800X can deliver full throughput at lower queue depths: the P4800X is rated to deliver maximum IOPS at QD16 while flash-based SSDs are specified for queue depths of at least 32. Unlike flash memory, the read and write performance of 3D XPoint memory is roughly equal, and this is reflected in Intel's specifications for the P4800X.

 

Conspicuously missing from the performance specifications are sequential throughput. The P4800X can already use more than half of the available PCIe bandwidth with a completely random I/O workload. Rather than reassure us that the P4800X can do even better with larger transfer sizes, Intel suggests that being overly concerned with the sequential transfer speeds is a sign that you should be shopping for their 3D NAND SSDs instead. They'll offer plenty of throughput for a far lower price.

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Intel's 3D XPoint memory is being manufactured as a 128Gb (16GB) die, slightly behind the trend for NAND flash capacities. As a result, the Optane SSD DC P4800X will start with a 375GB model and later this year be followed by 750GB and 1.5TB models. The top-performing enterprise SSDs currently tend to be multi-TB drives. Intel has shared very few details about the new controller they've developed for the P4800X, but they have disclosed that the 375GB model uses seven channels with four dies per channel, for a total of 28 chips and a raw capacity of 448GB. Fourteen packages of 3D XPoint memory are visible on the back side of the drive in the photographs Intel has released, suggesting that fourteen more packages are hiding under the heatsink and that the 375GB add-in card model is using single-die packages. The controller implements a high-performance all-hardware read path that does not involve the drive's firmware, and while the exact stride of memory accesses is not known, a single 4k read will be spread across all seven channels.

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The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X has a write endurance rating of 30 Drive Writes Per Day, and Intel is hopeful that future products can offer even higher ratings once 3D XPoint memory has more broadly proven its reliability. Today's limited release 375GB models have a three year warranty for a total write endurance rating of 12.3 PB, and once the product line is expanded to broad availability of the full range of capacities in the second half of this year the warranty period will be five years.

Intel is offering the 375GB P4800X in PCIe add-in card form factor with a MSRP of $1520 starting today with a limited early-ship program. In Q2 a 375GB U.2 model will ship, as well as a 750GB add-in card. In the second half of the year the rest of the capacity and form factor options will be available, but prices and exact release dates for those models have not been announced. At just over $4/GB the P4800X seems to fall much closer to DRAM than NAND in price, though to be fair the enterprise SSDs it will compete against are all well over $1/GB and the largest DDR4 DIMMs are around $10/GB.

Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Specifications
Capacity		375 GB	750 GB	1.5 TB
Form Factor		PCIe HHHL or 2.5" 15mm U.2
Interface		PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe
Controller		Intel unnamed
Memory		128Gb 20nm Intel 3D XPoint
Typical Latency (R/W)		<10µs
Random Read (4 KB) IOPS (QD16)		550k	TBA	TBA
Random Read 99.999% Latency (QD1)		60µs	TBA	TBA
Random Read 99.999% Latency (QD16)		150µs	TBA	TBA
Random Write (4 KB) IOPS (QD16)		500k	TBA	TBA
Random Write 99.999% Latency (QD1)		100µs	TBA	TBA
Random Write 99.999% Latency (QD16)		200µs	TBA	TBA
Endurance		30 DWPD
Warranty		5 years (3 years during early limited release)
MSRP		$1520	TBA	TBA
Release Date		March 19 (HHHL) Q2 2017 (U.2)	Q2 2017 (HHHL) 2H 2017 (U.2)	2H 2017

 

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Along with the DC P4800X, Intel is launching Intel Memory Drive Technology software as a paid add-on. The Memory Drive Technology software is a custom virtual memory system implemented as a minimal hypervisor. The guest operating system or general-purpose hypervisor is presented with the illusion that a portion of the 3D XPoint memory on the Optane SSD is directly addressable, producing an apparent memory capacity that far exceeds the capacity of the system's installed DRAM. Under the hood and almost entirely transparent to the guest OS, Intel Memory Drive Technology monitors memory access patterns to cache actively used data in DRAM and prefetch from Optane SSDs. At a high level, this is merely duplicating the paging mechanisms all operating systems already provide. However, Intel claims that the heuristics used by Memory Drive Technology can far outperform those currently used by operating systems to manage swap space residing on storage that is far slower than Optane SSDs. On some workloads Intel Memory Drive Technology can offer performance approaching that of an all-DRAM memory pool of equal capacity, though this will depend highly on the specific application workload.

It's been a long time since 3D XPoint was first announced, and there have been multiple delays since then, but it's finally here, albeit only for enterprise customers and not for us. While SSD prices have been slowly decreasing and capacities increasing over the last few years, ever since a year or two ago performance for the average user has come to a standstill. Boot up and app launch times have barely improved at all over the last year or two, but 3D XPoint could be here to change that. The original reason why SSDs were so much faster than HDDs was random read and writes and latency, and 3D XPoint seems to have significantly lower latency than NAND based SSDs as well as having somewhat higher random reads and writes. While it's nothing close to the "1000x faster" that Intel was advertising 3D XPoint flash to be compared to NAND, it still seems like it'll be a significant increase that we should be looking forward to. Hopefully regular consumer based 3D XPoint products get released soon as I really want to see if they can make any difference to performance for the average user.

[Bananasplit_00]

well this is sure to become a Intel only thing so Ryzen users will not be able to use it, but lets see if its actiually and good first then, looks nice on paper atleast

[Sakkura]

Below 10 microsecond latency, pretty nice, enterprise NAND SSDs probably hit a couple hundred microseconds in comparable conditions (does depend how Intel defined "typical").

 

500/550K IOPS at high QD, okay, not bad. High-end NAND SSDs usually top out around 200-250K.

 

I guess the 1000x speed-up is more like 2-50x at this point. Not as incredible as they were hyping, but still major progress.

[Techstorm970]

8 minutes ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

That doesn't make any sense. Why would Intel forgo such a huge share of their market for something that's not worth (by itself) switching to Intel for?

Because they already own like 99% of the enterprise and server markets. 

[Techstorm970]

1 minute ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

Why would servers need expensive, low-density high-speed storage? Nah, this is definitely aimed at the consumer market.

@DocSwag Said in his post...

28 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

It's been a long time since 3D XPoint was first announced, and there have been multiple delays since then, but it's finally here, albeit only for enterprise customers and not for us.

 

[Techstorm970]

2 minutes ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

Why would servers need expensive, low-density high-speed storage?

I definitely agree with this, though.  This SSD makes no sense for the ultra high end markets.

[VerticalDiscussions]

Holy jesus that was one long article. Wurth it.

[Blade of Grass]

16 hours ago, wrathoftheturkey said:

Why would servers need expensive, low-density high-speed storage? Nah, this is definitely aimed at the consumer market.

16 hours ago, techstorm970 said:

I definitely agree with this, though.  This SSD makes no sense for the ultra high end markets.

What? Consumers have less demand for high performance than enterprise does. An SSD like this would help to mitigate the effect of IO-bound operations, such as the ones experienced in virtualization, complex model simulations (fluid dynamics),  DNA sequencing, or even something as simple as serving content on the web (which, for well designed systems, is largely IO-bound). 

 

I believe you're likely being sarcastic, but the lack of a /s and the fact that I could reasonably see some people believe this makes me suspicious  

[Tech_Dreamer]

$1520 for a ~400gb storage drive!

[TOMPPIX]

1 hour ago, DocSwag said:

$1520

hehehe i could buy 5 960gb ssds with that much money.

[Techstorm970]

6 minutes ago, TOMPPIX said:

hehehe i could buy 5 960gb ssds with that much money.

Yeah.  That money would be better spent putting five 850 EVO 1TB drives in a Raid 0 array.  Boom!  5TB of SSD storage.

[DocSwag]

36 minutes ago, techstorm970 said:

I definitely agree with this, though.  This SSD makes no sense for the ultra high end markets.

There's a reason why I think Facebook switched to storing all their stuff in ram instead of nand, because it's much faster and if you have millions of people accessing your website or database you need fast, low latency storage. While this is expensive, it's still cheaper from a $/GB standpoint than ram and you get the benefit of it being non volatile. I'd say that ultra high end markets are the places that this will be the most useful, actually, as most consumers aren't willing to pay the price but enterprise customers will (especially if they're willing to pay the price to store everything in ram).

[DocSwag]

1 hour ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

well this is sure to become a Intel only thing so Ryzen users will not be able to use it, but lets see if its actiually and good first then, looks nice on paper atleast

It's literally a pcie ssd, so I really doubt it. Previous Intel enterprise SSDs weren't Intel exclusive either so why should this be different?

[N3v3r3nding_N3wb]

11 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

It's literally a pcie ssd, so I really doubt it. Previous Intel enterprise SSDs weren't Intel exclusive either so why should this be different?

Source: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-optane-technology.html

 

Yeah, it's Intel Kaby Lake-exclusive.

[Bananasplit_00]

45 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

It's literally a pcie ssd, so I really doubt it. Previous Intel enterprise SSDs weren't Intel exclusive either so why should this be different?

because its OPTANE? im pretty sure its been said that it will be Intel only

[RagnarokDel]

1 hour ago, Sakkura said:

Below 10 microsecond latency, pretty nice, enterprise NAND SSDs probably hit a couple hundred microseconds in comparable conditions (does depend how Intel defined "typical").

 

500/550K IOPS at high QD, okay, not bad. High-end NAND SSDs usually top out around 200-250K.

 

I guess the 1000x speed-up is more like 2-50x at this point. Not as incredible as they were hyping, but still major progress.

they're limited by PCIE 3 lol

[Sakkura]

2 hours ago, RagnarokDel said:

they're limited by PCIE 3 lol

Shouldn't be. 550K IOPS at 4K is ~2.2 GB/s, where PCIe 3.0 x4 can handle 3.94 GB/s in theory.

[captain_to_fire]

So how is this faster than the Samsung 960 Pro?

[leadeater]

4 hours ago, N3v3r3nding_N3wb said:

Source: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-optane-technology.html

 

Yeah, it's Intel Kaby Lake-exclusive.

That is the consumer variants of Optane, Enterprise options and of course pricing is vastly different.

[AnonymousGuy]

My workstation replacement is waiting for the consumer variant of this to launch in 3 months or so, hopefully the 1.5TB option isn't 6 months out.

[AnonymousGuy]

1 hour ago, hey_yo_ said:

So how is this faster than the Samsung 960 Pro?

5x faster QD1 performance in random R/W which is what most enthusiasts should care about.  Big sequential numbers and QD32 figures don't mean shit.

[DocSwag]

5 hours ago, N3v3r3nding_N3wb said:

Source: http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-technology/intel-optane-technology.html

 

Yeah, it's Intel Kaby Lake-exclusive.

 

19 minutes ago, leadeater said:

That is the consumer variants of Optane, Enterprise options and of course pricing is vastly different.

Intel has stated before skylake will work as well with optane, so I presume this is just referring to using it as a cache for storage rather than working.

[TheCherryKing]

I don't really see this as groundbreaking as Intel has already released NVMe SSDs that use PCIe x8 and have speeds around 5 GB/s!

[leadeater]

28 minutes ago, TheCherryKing said:

I don't really see this as groundbreaking as Intel has already released NVMe SSDs that use PCIe x8 and have speeds around 5 GB/s!

It's the latency that's the important part not the throughput, if you need throughput you can get it using multiple SSDs but you can't decrease latency with multiple SSDs and in actual fact you typically raise it doing so.

 

Bandwidth is a factor of I/O size and I/O rate: Bandwidth = I/O Size * IOPs

 

If we take an example of say Microsoft SQL Server which uses an I/O size of 64KB and look at an SSD that can sustain 24/7 IOPs of 15,000 we can work out the real application bandwidth.

 

960,000 KB/s = 64KB * 15000

937.5MB/s

 

As you can see the only way to improve Microsoft SQL Server application performance is to increase the IOPs and the only way that increases is by reducing the latency of the storage. Also storage latency is different depending on the I/O size and then as the article explains most SSDs can only reach their maximum IOPs with high queue depths so that is yet another factor.

 

Consumer SSD specifications are rated using their burst figures in best case possible, enterprise SSDs don't. This is why you'll see a Samsung 850 Pro rated at 100K IOPs but a server SSD rated at 30K IOPs completely surpass it in every way in real application usage. SSDs can only perform at their peak for extremely short periods of time, for example that Samsung 850 Pro steady state IOPs is only about 10k-15k.

[DocSwag]

1 hour ago, Tedny said:

1520$ for 375Gb..... I will wait..... like 5 more years 

This is for enterprise and those products are always substantially more expensive, so I'd imagine that the consumer products will be cheaper.