1,000x performance, but they are introducing it with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface? That is suspicious. And then they are going to follow with a lower cost PCIe 3.0 x2 version? (That they still label as an Enthusiast / Workstation product?) I wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market so that you have to pay a lot for the "enterprise" product to get the full performance. Or, alternatively, if the real world performance is nowhere near the 1000x they keep talking about.
I wonder if they will position these as replacements for you SSD, or if they are going to pitch them as a caching layer they way they dabbled in hybrid SSD/HDD approaches.
Basically on a PCIe 3.0 x4 maximum performance is 4000GB/s, in practice this is 3200-3500MB/s. With 4k random write, you will get maximum 800.000 to 875.000 iops per second. Consumer-grade SSD's barely manage to write 500-1000 iops when sending the ATA_CMD_FLUSH command unless they are lying which is really bad.
Right, elsewhere in these comments it was pointed out that they are talking about a 1,000x improvement in latency vs flash memory. If they are using PCIe x4 and x2, then it seems that their throughput isn't going to be much better than existing SSDs.
Improved 4k random read and write would of course sill be a big win.
I wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market...
Intel always does this and Optane won't be any exception.
The "1,000x" claims are either at the chip level (e.g. NAND block erase vs. XPoint word write) or maybe some access pattern that is worst-case for flash. It's physically impossible to get 1,000x improvement on common access patterns.
I wonder if they will position these as replacements for you SSD, or if they are going to pitch them as a caching layer they way they dabbled in hybrid SSD/HDD approaches.