Intel has PCIe 4.0 Optane SSDs Ready, But Nothing to Plug Them Into

erek

erek

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Dec 19, 2005
Messages
10,868
Hmm, wonder if they're any good:

"From what we can glean from the posts, Ober has already sampled the drives on one Linux developer, meaning the drives are likely in the final stages of development, and is actively sampling the drives to others."

upload_2020-1-4_22-8-37.png


https://www.tomshardware.com/news/i...witter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dlvr.it
 
erek said:
Hmm, wonder if they're any good:

"From what we can glean from the posts, Ober has already sampled the drives on one Linux developer, meaning the drives are likely in the final stages of development, and is actively sampling the drives to others."

View attachment 213092

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/i...witter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=dlvr.it
Click to expand...


Judging by how amazing the gen 3 optane drives are (even now with some gen 4 drives in the market, nothing touches them) I'm sure they are amazing.

I'm pretty sure they are not ready to hand AMD a gift by launching a drive that only reaches it's potential on their platform though :p
 
They'll probably try to sell to enterprise customers while they ready their pcie4 platform, maybe offer a few low-end skus to consumers.
 
Oh the irony. You would have thought that it would be pcie 5 like they were saying... lmao.
 
From the article:
Meanwhile, Intel has been mired on the PCIe 3.0 interface due to its next-gen architectures being locked behind its transition to the 10nm node. The company does plan to make future architectures portable between nodes, but for now, the company doesn’t have any PCIe 4.0-capable chips, and barring any big unexpected announcements this week at CES, it doesn’t appear the company will support the interface until late 2020 or early 2021.
Click to expand...
The world is moving on Intel, time to catch up, yikes! :eek:

The drives themselves do look damn good, though, and might be worth picking a few up once they officially release.
 
I'm a little disappointed that these are 4.0 drives. I had been hoping that Intel would simply skip over 4.0 and go straight to 5.0.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Auer
like this
Nobu said:
Well that one is definitely sata, can't speak for others. lol
Click to expand...
there is actually a point to using optane and sata? lol i thought this hole post was about high performance usage
 
primetime said:
there is actually a point to using optane and sata? lol i thought this hole post was about high performance usage
Click to expand...
It's probably just a stock photo they picked because it was an intel drive, with no other relation to the story. I'm pretty sure I've seen one like it before.
 
wyqtor said:
I think it's U.2 (the connector, not the band!)

If you look closely, there appear to be additional pins between the power and data ones, which means it's not SATA.
Click to expand...
Yeah, that it is.
 
Thunderdolt said:
I'm a little disappointed that these are 4.0 drives. I had been hoping that Intel would simply skip over 4.0 and go straight to 5.0.
Click to expand...

They could be like the Phison drives where the controller and the PCIe linkage are partially decoupled, so they could do a quick turnaround on the E12 drives, replace gen 3 with gen 4 and launch E16.

This is probably why E16 drives aren't all that impressive at Gen4, but this doesn't have to be the case with this approach if you over-design the controller anticipating that the next gen will be available in the future...

Either way, more and more SSD performance is not PCIe limited except for the rare times you copy large sequential files from one NVMe drive to another.

99% of NVMe drive usage is random access limited by IOPS at levels well well below even Gen3 speeds. Even the almighty Optane drives.

This is why Optane drives still beat the Gen4 drives on the market, despite being on Gen3.
 
Last edited:
Nobu said:
It's probably just a stock photo they picked because it was an intel drive, with no other relation to the story. I'm pretty sure I've seen one like it before.
Click to expand...

If you look at Intels product offerings though, the only m.2 Optane drives they have released to date have been the tiny 16GB and 32GB drives limited by only using 2x lanes, intended for consumer system caching of a slower drive.

Their more badass Optane drives are all U.2 or PCIe slot, so the picture makes lots of sense for Optane drives.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
If you look at Intels product offerings though, the only m.2 Optane drives they have released to date have been the tiny 16GB and 32GB drives limited by only using 2x lanes, intended for consumer system caching of a slower drive.

Their more badass Optane drives are all U.2 or PCIe slot, so the picture makes lots of sense for Optane drives.
Click to expand...

800p were m.2 Optane drives at 58GB and 118GB. They only used PCIe 3.0 x2 interfaces as there wasn't enough chips for throughput to exceed that. Still substantial latency and random (at low QD) performance gains over NAND based NVMe SSDs.

The successor in the 815p seemed to have been cancelled. In general it looks like Intel's consumer face Optane products are on the backburner for the foreseeable future with the possible except as Optane/QLC hybrid drives.
 
Won't increasing your RAM still beat this Optane, at least on Linux?
 
wyqtor said:
I think it's U.2 (the connector, not the band!)

If you look closely, there appear to be additional pins between the power and data ones, which means it's not SATA.
Click to expand...

That's exactly what it is.
 
primetime said:
I forgot to ask.....what boards currently use this connector? (my current board is not already out of date?) Is that used on server boards only?
Click to expand...

U.2 ports were used on tons of boards around the Z97 and Z170 era. After that, the connection died off. It's common in the server world but not common in the desktop world where the mobile M.2 format achieved dominance. Technically, they are both pretty much the same thing. They are PCI-Express based NVMe interfaces. There are even M.2 to U.2 adapters if you want to use such a drive with a common desktop motherboard.

Intel had many of its consumer SSD's in the 750 line which used the U.2 connector.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top