Computex 2017: VROC Technology Passing 10 GB/sec with M2

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One of the things at Computex that popped out a bit is the new Intel VROC technology (Virtual RAID On CPU) that can be used with certain X299 motherboards and Skylake processors.



While the idea is nice, the implementation, not so much.Basically what you are going to see are VROC add-in cards, these PCBs can house up-to eight M2 units and reach silly performance in RAID mode over a full X16 PCI-Express link.

To use the unit it defaults toward software RAID (which eats away CPU cycles) and we noticed roughly 20% CPU utilization on a 10-core part (so that is using two CPU cores 100%).

Now here where things go wrong and where you can see the Intel greed, hardware raid is on-board and is an option. You can unlock hardware RAID through a physical unlock key that you will need to plug into the (compatible) motherboard. You can purchase to keys, one will unlock RAID 0/1 for mirroring and striping.  The RAID 0/1 solution will be expensive and starts at 150 USD. So you purchase the board, then the M2 units and then if you like to have the hardware RAID options (which is already on-board) need to purchase a key that unlocks this.

For RAID 5/10 you need to pay roughly 250 USD for the corresponding unlock key. We'll post more info later. Granted, you can hit ludicrous speeds with enough capacity for overflowing game libraries. There’s another catch, these will only with with Skylake-X processors, Kaby-lake –X does not support VROC.


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