Intel today demonstrated its Optane SSDs and showed how they achieved to transfer data with an average speed of about 2 GB/during the Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen. The Optane SSDs make use of Intel's 3D XPoint technology which was first announced in July 2015.
During the announcement Intel stated 3D XPoint would be 1000 times faster than traditional NAND memory. The real world performance demonstration Intel showed today showed nothing of those numbers. In a demonstration where Intel compared a SATA SSD vs. a PCIe x4 NVMe Optane SSD, the drives achieved 280MB/s and 1.95GB/s respectively. That's still about 7 times faster nonetheless.
The showcased Optane SSDs were also early prototypes which gives us hope Intel will squeeze out more performance once the drives are ready to be sold. Purchasing Optane SSDs should be possible as early as this year.
For the test Intel used two identical computers to which it connected two different SSDs, one internal and one external, connected by Thunderbolt 3. One computer used a TLC NAND based SATA SSD, the other used a PCIe x4 NVMe Optane SSD.
The transfer between the SATA NAND based SSDs finished with an average speed of 280 MB/s, while the transfer between the Optane SSDs was more stable and finished with an average speed of about 1.95GB/s. (To check the demonstration, skip to 5:35)
It's likely consumers won't see full Optane based SSDs in the near future, it will likely be used as cache to increase performance of 'regular' SSDs.
