Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

Re:Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance by jacquesm on Monday June 13, 2016 @05:45PM (#11897969)

Bulk data is the key there, for many other use cases servers are already using SSDs and once the economies of scale will cause another order of magnitude decrease in cost I think spinning disks will be much more expensive in $/GB than SSDs. Chips are cheap, robust, quite dense and should have a much longer operating life than anything mechanical. The writing is on the platters.

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Re:Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance by vitus on Monday June 13, 2016 @11:55PM (#11899648)

Not just this; HDD technology has been stagnating, while SSD technology still has yet to reach its full potential. In the last five years, HDDs haven't really gotten cheaper (other than market returning to pre-flooding equilibrium). On the other hand, SSDs have gotten easily 4x cheaper in that same period of time.

Plus, since SSDs aren't using the latest process technology (as far as I'm aware), they still have a few more years of Moore's law ahead of them. Shrinking transistor size means increased density (and at lower cost, once you recoup the cost of the mask).

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Re:Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance by wtallis on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @03:09AM (#11900306)

> Plus, since SSDs aren't using the latest process technology (as far as I'm aware), they still have a few more years of Moore's law ahead of them. Shrinking transistor size means increased density (and at lower cost, once you recoup the cost of the mask).

Nope. SSDs have already hit the wall and dug into it a ways. Everybody is doing 16nm/15nm NAND flash and struggling to get ~40nm 3D NAND out the door, but they can't beat the $/GB of planar NAND. Sub-20nm TLC flash has had serious problems with the data just plain leaking out of the memory cell, to say nothing of the scary low program/erase cycle counts. The only thing that really kept the SSD market advancing over the past year was the widespread adoption of better error correcting codes to cope with lower quality flash.

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Re:Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance by baq on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @02:15AM (#11900131)

shrinking transistor size may also mean reduced durability, so it's not all roses. we'll see.

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Re:Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance by snuxoll on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @03:12AM (#11900319)

If we halve the size of NAND memory cells we can afford to allocate an additional 20% of them for reallocation when other cells fail. It's not a perfect solution by any means, but it is a solution to increase the lifespan nonetheless.

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