Intel Announces Its Next Generation Memory and Storage Products

Intel Announces Its Next Generation Memory and Storage Products

What’s New: Today, at Intel’s Memory and Storage 2020 event, the company highlighted six new memory and storage products to help customers meet the challenges of digital transformation. Key to advancing innovation across memory and storage, Intel announced two new additions to its Intel® Optane™ Solid State Drive (SSD) Series: the Intel® Optane™ SSD P5800X, the world’s fastest data center SSD, and the Intel® Optane™ Memory H20 for client, which features performance and mainstream productivity for gaming and content creation. Optane helps meet the needs of modern computing by bringing the memory closer to the CPU. The company also revealed its intent to deliver its 3rd generation of Intel® Optane™ persistent memory (code-named “Crow Pass”) for cloud and enterprise customers.

“Today is a key moment for our memory and storage journey. With the release of these new Optane products, we continue our innovation, strengthen our memory and storage portfolio, and enable our customers to better navigate the complexity of digital transformation. Optane products and technologies are becoming a mainstream element of business compute. And as a part of Intel, these leadership products are advancing our long-term growth priorities, including AI, 5G networking and the intelligent, autonomous edge.”
–Alper Ilkbahar, Intel vice president in the Data Platforms Group and general manager of the Intel Optane Group

What Else Intel Announced: Intel also announced three new NAND SSDs featuring 144-layer cell memory: the Intel SSD 670p, the company’s next-gen144-layer quad-level-cell (QLC) 3D NAND SSD for mainstream computing; the Intel SSD D7-P5510, the world’s first-to-market 144-layer triple-level-cell NAND design; and the Intel SSD D5-P5316, a greater-density, higher-endurance SSD built around the industry’s first 144-layer QLC NAND.

Why Intel Optane Technology Matters: With today’s Intel Optane technology announcements, Intel continues to establish a new tier in the data center memory and storage pyramid, which combines the attributes of both DRAM and NAND. Intel Optane SSDs alleviate data supply bottlenecks and accelerate applications with fast caching and fast storage to increase scale-per-server and reduce transaction costs for latency-sensitive workloads.

The Intel Optane SSD P5800X with next-generation Intel Optane memory and advanced controller delivers “no-compromises” I/O performance and high endurance, providing unprecedented value over legacy storage in the accelerating world of intelligent data. Intel introduced the P5800X in December 2020. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

The Intel SSD 670p is the next gen 144-layer QLC 3D NAND SSD for mainstream computing that will continue to deliver high productivity for real-world workload uses and applications in the PC client. Intel introduced the 670p in December 2020. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

Intel Optane persistent memory is Intel’s vision of a memory and storage solution that offers persistence, capacity, affordability, low latency and memory-like speed. With Intel Optane persistent memory, Intel has re-architected the memory and storage hierarchy allowing it to be used as a distinct capacity and performance tier for memory and storage. With this approach, it is possible to create a two-tiered memory architecture where DRAM is the performance tier and persistent memory is the capacity tier. In the case of storage, Optane persistent memory is used as the performance tier to the NAND capacity tier.

The Intel SSD D5-P5316 is the industry’s first 144-layer QLC design, which optimizes and accelerates legacy capacity storage. The responsiveness of Intel 3D NAND QLC with high capacity and performance is targeted for the warm storage segment. Intel introduced the D5-P5316 in December 2020. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

Intel Optane persistent memory is attached to the CPU via the double-data rate bus, enabling direct load-and-store access at DRAM speeds; non-volatile, it combines the best elements of memory and storage.

Intel will further strengthen and extend its unique memory and storage portfolio with its 3rd generation of Intel Optane persistent memory, code-named “Crow Pass” and in future Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (code-named “Sapphire Rapids.”)

Why 144-layer cell memory NAND Matters: Three new NAND SSDs announced today represent new milestones for establishing TLC and QLC as a mainstream technology for high-capacity drives. The Intel® 3D NAND SSD 670p is Intel’s next-gen 144-layer quad-level-cell (QLC) 3D NAND SSD for mainstream computing. The Intel SSD D7-P5510 is the world’s first-to-market 144-layer TLC NAND design and the Intel SSD D5-P5316 is built around the industry’s first 144-layer QLC NAND. Intel has been developing these technologies over the past decade.

Intel Optane Memory H20 is the next generation of Optane memory-based storage solution for PCs, enabling fast, responsive storage performance. Intel introduced the H20 in December 2020. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

Product Fact Sheet: Intel’s New Memory and Storage Products

Optane Products

• Intel® Optane™ SSD P5800X: Intel’s next-gen Optane media solution brings outstanding quality of service for predictable performance, leading input/output-operations-per-second performance across workloads, and the best endurance value in the industry. Being Intel’s first PCIe 4.0 Solid State Drive (SSD), this drive performs over three times faster than the previous generation, the Intel Optane SSD P4800X, which has already carved out an important niche in data center storage thanks to its excellent endurance and overall performance.
• Intel® Optane™ Memory H20 with SSD: The H20 is Intel’s next-gen performance and capacity storage for thin-and light notebooks and other space constrained PC platforms. By combining Intel Optane Memory with Intel® quad-level-cell (QLC) 3D NAND, customers can accelerate PCs with breakthrough responsiveness to search and find files faster, launch applications quicker
  and transfer data at PCIe speeds.
• Intel® Optane™ persistent memory 3rd gen: To address the ever-increasing need for memory and storage, Intel revealed its intent to deliver the 3rd generation of Intel Optane persistent memory, code-named “Crow Pass,” in future Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (code-named “Sapphire Rapids”).

What Is Optane? Getting data to where it is needed, when it is needed, has always been a key challenge for main memory and storage, which serve as the data supply chain to the CPU. Memory is fast but holds relatively small amounts of data that can be lost when power is removed. Storage devices, like hard drives and SSDs, permanently hold large amounts of data, but are much slower than memory, which in turn slows down performance.

Intel® 3D XPoint™ delivers both memory and storage. This novel memory material retains data not by building structures out of silicon – as done with the more familiar DRAM and NAND technology – but rather by storing data ‘bits’ within the molecular structure of the material itself. Intel Optane products using 3D XPoint make it possible for organizations to take a new, innovative
approach to storage and memory as they build out solutions from edge to cloud. Optane SSDs alleviate data supply bottlenecks, and the more recent Optane persistent memory modules are beginning to deliver the long-awaited promise of an affordable, large capacity memory that never loses data.

NAND Products

• Intel® 3D NAND SSD 670p: On the client side, this is Intel’s next-gen 144-layer quad-level-cell (QLC) 3D NAND SSD for mainstream computing. It offers end-to-end data protection with Pyrite 2.0 security and power-loss notification support to help improve IT efficiency and drive manageability for real-world uses and applications in the PC client.
• Intel® SSD D7-P5510: The world’s first-to-market 144-layer triple-layer-cell NAND design helps to accelerate a wide range of cloud data center workloads. Designed as a high-capacity replacement for cloud storage, the Intel SSD D7-P5510 is a U.2 form factor with 3.84 terabytes (TB) or 7.68 TB of space. It features improved device health monitoring, greater flexibility for multi-tenant and virtualized environments, and new algorithms and features tuned specifically to address cloud workloads. Available this quarter, Q4’ 20.
• Intel® SSD D5-P5316: The industry’s first 144-layer QLC design optimizes and accelerates legacy capacity storage and is available in the first half of 2021. With 128 gigabytes per die, it provides up to 200% better read performance, 38% better random read performance and 48% better latency over hard drives. This drive will come in 15.36 terabyte (TB) and 30.30.72 TB capacities and will be available in a U.2 and E1.L form factors. It’s the first 30.72 TB PCIe SSD that enables a full petabyte (PB) in one rack unit- or 1 PB in 1U.