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NVDIMM-N

It'southward been a busy calendar week for non-volatile memory storage, with major announcements from both Micron and Intel. Showtime up in that location's Micron, with a major announcement in NVDIMMs. Before we striking information technology, a quick refresher:

There are 3 NVDIMM (Not-Volatile DIMM) storage standards, though just two are available today. NVDIMM-F is a DIMM built with NAND instead of DRAM — DRAM buffers are installed in separate physical DIMM slots. NVDIMM-F is lower power than traditional retentiveness, only latency is much higher and transfer speeds far lower. NVDIMM-F has been bachelor since 2022. NVDIMM-P, which isn't supposed to hitting market until 2022 at the earliest, really embeds storage inside DRAM.

NVDIMM-North, the standard Micron is launching today, pairs NAND wink and traditional DRAM on the same module. In this configuration, DRAM is accessed directly and NAND flash serves every bit a storage buffer. In the consequence of a power loss, data stored in DRAM is copied to the NAND wink (there'southward a SuperCap power connector on the DIMM to keep information technology powered long enough for this process to finish). But there are likewise performance advantages to keeping ofttimes-accessed data in near-term storage — the system can pull data back out of the NAND buffer if needed, at dramatically lower latencies than traditional systems:

This latency chart shows how dissimilar configurations of NVDIMM-P compare with standard access latency via the I/O stack. At present, keep in mind, 85,000 nanoseconds isn't exactly a long time — it's 8.5E-5, or 0.000085s. Humans aren't going to notice a difference between 85,000ns and 35ns, but these shifts prove how computers and servers are nevertheless getting faster despite the clock speed plateau. Past accelerating other parts of the system, like the storage stack, we can however increase reliability and performance.

Intel Announces New Optane DIMMs

Meanwhile, Intel is planning its own major play in this space. Optane has already launched in PCIe cards and SSDs, but we haven't seen it in a DIMM form factor yet. Intel has at present appear that it will launch Optane DIMMs, only doesn't expect to have them in-market for at to the lowest degree a twelvemonth. It's also not clear if they'll accept their own standard (requiring specific server back up) or non. Optane isn't a drop-in replacement for NAND, and whether Intel can match the JEDEC specification closely enough to claim NVDIMM-N support seems dubious.

Intel-3DXPoint

Of form, Intel doesn't necessarily lose if Optane support requires new chipsets and CPUs to utilize. As Anandtech observes, Intel could just time these introductions for a Xeon Scalable and chipset refresh. People are going to exist watching Optane closely; Intel has previously claimed the standard could deliver vastly better endurance at higher performance levels compared with NAND. If Optane performs well equally non-volatile storage in the datacenter, consumer PCs a few years from now might well offer their ain version of the aforementioned capability.