Intel sponsored our trip down to their campus in folsom california where we
will be taking an exclusive look at the latest breakthrough in some super
awesome cool tech that they're calling their Intel optane technology based on
3d crosspoint memory media and all this is taking place in advance of you normal
consumers being able to buy oh wait
now that i think about it that um that sounds an awful lot like all the
other coverage of this stuff but no the difference this time is that an opt-in
memory module like the one i'm holding in my hand will be available for
purchase in about a month for 50 bucks
okay so what is an optane memory module
here's the cliffs notes dram is the super fast storage that
holds the data that's integral to whatever it is your system is doing at a
given moment so when you go to launch a web browser or a game a simulation data
set or video editing program whatever that is where everything gets kept so
that the program runs smoothly so that's great right let's just put
let's just put everything in there right wrong wrong wrong wrong
dram has two major limitations the first
of which being that dram is very
expensive you probably have less than a tenth as much dram in your system as you
have other types of storage and number two is that dram is what's known as
volatile so that means when the system loses power
poof the data is gone
so that is why we have what's known as
non-volatile storage so this is where your pictures or
files or anything that you don't want to disappear every time you turn off your
computer goes and the most common types of non-volatile storage in order of
speed are the hard disk drive or HDD
the solid-state disk or SSD with SATA
interface or more recently an NVMe SSD
like this 750 series right here
getting back to optane though 3d crosspoint memory is unlike
anything we've ever seen before at a die level both its performance and endurance
exceed even the nand used in the highest end ssds today
and perhaps even more importantly it has
only 10 times the access latency as dram
meaning that it can be used as more of an extension
of system memory or like a fifth level of CPU cache and it
can do that without worrying about the
right cycle limitations or long system stutters or
delays that would be associated with grabbing data off of a more traditional
storage device and the real kicker then is this it does all of this stuff while
being non-volatile the data stays there
so here is a normal computer Intel did
provide it but i have checked
no monkey business 7700k ow z270a i got a water cooler on there
that uh herpa derp with the uh RAM spacing there
it's got one fan on it and uh you gotta what is that gtx 1080 and uh three
terabyte wd blue hard drive
so in summary then this small 16 or 32
gig stick sits somewhere between your ddr4 RAM and
your mechanical hard drive so i'm thinking
kind of there but no not really acting as a way
faster data cache allowing application launch times and system responsiveness
up to several times faster and this time
Intel claims although we've all heard this before that it's easy
so let's try it out then shall we oh
action rule yes
here we go and here's the performance of a normal
computer if you can call it that i mean i'm not just talking
boot times like click on things how long you wait oh
okay so now we're gonna put in the Intel optane
memory module let's shut this baby down eventually
at this time that requires a seventh generation
core series processor and a 200 series desktop motherboard
you find an available m.2 slot so here's
there's actually two on this motherboard screw it in
and boop there it is
about 3.7 gigabytes per second of theoretical bandwidth to our memory
that's awkward i was like there's no button there
finally we reboot and we're actually going to be measuring
this even though we are not expecting there to be any significant difference
in boot time since the optane memory module hasn't had a chance to cache
anything yet and hypothesis confirmed it is
marginally faster but there's also significant variance once you factor in
waiting for all this crap to load up when you boot up Windows
and for that matter this is true for
everything we ran after initially installing the optane
memory module on the second run
now we're talking here optane is starting to flex its muscles a little
bit game loading times are not affected as much but boot times and application
load times are noticeably
snappier for our third run ignoring the margin of
error inherent and relying on my fingers to press a stopwatch overall the results
look pretty darn similar to the third and still very good
so that was really cool but with that said i don't think anybody
at Intel is trying to convince the enthusiast user who wants to give them
700 for a 1.2 terabyte NVMe SSD to throw
that junk in the garbage and run out and buy a big old hard drive and strap a 16
or 32 gig opt-in module to it instead no
i think the pitch here is that in a typical consumer workload
the optane module can hold enough of the
operating system and program data to
achieve SSD like responsiveness at a
lower cost without manually using
frequently used data around like many users with SSD boot drives and HDD
storage drives have to deal with today
so this tech was already capable of
measurable noticeable improvements to system
responsiveness back when it was called srt and it used slower lower endurance
nand flash in order to accelerate the computing experience
so what we're looking at now then is a way for Intel to take everything that
they learned about intelligently caching data for the user and give it the low
latency high endurance and simplicity
that it always i guess needed to really
shine so a huge shout out to Intel for sponsoring this video bringing us down
here to exclusively bring you this hands-on experience with their optane
memory module thanks to you guys for watching and as always if you dislike
the video you know what to do but if you liked it hit that like button get
subscribed leave a comment letting me know what do you guys
think of this would you use optane to accelerate a boot volume would you use
it to accelerate even a secondary storage volume
what do you want to see this technology in because i can tell you
this is not the last we've seen of it and finally check out at the link in the
video description where to buy the stuff we featured our merch store and our
community forum i'll see you guys later