According to a leaked roadmap Intel is to release three Optane SSD product lines, these would be based on the new 3D Xpoint storage technology. The SSDs could arrive as soon as the end of the year.
The roadmap was posted by benchlife and mentions Mansion Beach, Brighton Beach and Stony Beach, the three codenames that intel uses for their Optane series products. Mansion Beach would be the first to arrive at the end of 2016 and would be a PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD series with NVMe interface.
Brighton Beach sits a little lower on the list but is still intended for demanding users. These SSDs contain a PCI-E 3.0 x2 interface and should appear early 2017. Finally, Stony Beach is intended only for system acceleration.
By that time the first Kaby Lake processors should be ready as well. These processors will get support for Optane memory. Kaby Lake is followed in turn by Cannon Lake processors, which will be manufactured at 10nm. Stony Beach is intended for the Cannon Lake-generation succeeded by Carson Beach.
Intel developed Optane storage memory in collaboration with Micron. It combines the raw speed of system memory with the storage capacity of flash memory. It is a form of phase change memory, in which individual cells or bits as can be addressed individually like dram, in flash memory cells are always a string read out and described by block. Initially 128Gbit chips should be releases, which are built around a Crosspoint Array Structure, which can be addressed to 128 billion memory cells.
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Rumor: Intel to release three Optane SSD product lines
