New Intel Tech Bridges Gap Between Fast Conventional Memory, Longer-Term Storage

Just going by the headline (since the usual paywall workarounds are failing), it seems like this is a rehash of Intel's original marketing claims for 3D XPoint/Optane, but as far as I can tell they've quietly backpedaled to "expensive SSD" for the first-gen products.

This seems oddly reminiscent of Larrabee/Knight's Landing/Xeon Phi, which started off being billed as Intel's high-performance GPU play (they reportedly even hired Michael Abrash to optimize the rasterization code) and ended up being a niche HPC accelerator.

>Intel claims the raw 3D XPoint technology is 1,000 times faster than the NAND flash commonly used in storage drives

I like haw they claim the "raw technology" is 1,000 times faster. Why? Because the shipping product isn't anything NEAR 1,000 times faster. They started off with that marketing claim months, and months, and months ago. The finished product appears to be not even double the performance (depending on workload).

ahh, should've kept reading:

>Although Intel touts 3D XPoint as orders of magnitude faster than NAND, it said the new storage drives it is shipping are five-to-eight times faster than NAND-based solid-state drives, because they are constrained by the conventional interface used to connect storage to computers.

So the PCIe interface is the constraint? please* you guys just over promised and under delivered. NVMe can certainly push more than 5x what you can get out of current NAND based drives.

Same article as in WSJ here? http://www.morningstar.com/news/dow-jones/TDJNDN_20170319473...

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13850746