You know what's besides the XPoint, Intel? Somebody else's storage-class memory – SK Hynix

South Korean DRAM and NAND fabber SK Hynix has been developing storage-class memory that will compete with 3D XPoint and which The Register understands is currently under R&D process. The flash fabber first signalled its intentions with a paper presented by company researchers six months ago at the IEEE International Electron …

[Duncan Macdonald]

This will hurt Intel's profits

If Optane memory has to compete with storage class memory (SCM) from other suppliers then the price that Intel can charge will be limited.

Also as the other suppliers have no reason to limit their products to only Intel CPUs, we can expect to see SCM being available on AMD systems - removing another thing that Intel had hoped would be a competitive edge against AMD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Until there is widespread OS support for storage-class memory, it's basically just fast flash storage.

At which point it becomes SSD < SCM << RAM for speed and RAM >> SCM > SSD. At the moment, Optane (for SCM) is around 3x the cost of SSD for 10% more performance versus being one third the cost of RAM but 1/10th the performance.

It will be interesting to see how PCIe4 changes things with Optane vs SSD - my money is on SSD getting a little faster and PCIe4 making the performance difference small enough for Optane to be ignored, although Intel's lack of PCIe4, cores and memory channels for the next year or two may make it the only Intel performance boost in town.

[druck]

There is already plenty of OS support for flash based NVDIMM, and once XPoint like technology is freed from Intel's expensive proprietary tie-in, that will be supported just as easily.

[Anonymous Coward]

Support and seamless integration are separate things.

To achieve boot to last memory state from Windows/Linux I need to invest significant effort to get any noticeable difference to booting from a suspend to disk state with SSD.

[Alan Brown]

"Optane (for SCM) is around 3x the cost of SSD for 10% more performance"

The advantage of Optane over SSD comes in latency and endurance. You can pound the snot out of it all day everyday without killing it, which makes it ideal as cache storage.

[luis river]

Intel Discover enigma?

From time ago Intel assert that Optane is not PCM, but I believe that is one distract maneuver. From many years Intel manage their efforts R&D focused on PCM and it had large quantity of registered Patent in this tech and very little of RRAM patent. Now is time from Intel unveil this enigma.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm... Chinese fabber...

What, only like a 99% chance they stole the IP and it will be substandard quality manufacturing?