MSI this week announced plans to bundle Intel Optane Memory 16 GB caching drives with select Intel 200-series chipset motherboards. The company claims that the drives will not increase prices of motherboards significantly, but will bring tangible perf…
In February, Micron CEO Mark Durcan announced his retirement after three decades with the company. Durcan had previously announced plans to retire in 2012 while serving as the company’s president, but the death of then-CEO Steve Appleton prompted Durcan to postpone his retirement indefinitely to serve as Micron’s CEO. Micron’s board of directors has now selected Sanjay Mehrotra to be the new president and CEO of Micron. Durcan will step down and be replaced by Mehrotra effective May 8, 2017.
Mehrotra’s background includes co-founding SanDisk in 1988 and serving as its president and CEO from 2011 until its acquisition in 2016 by Western Digital. Prior to serving as CEO of SanDisk, Mehrotra had been the chief operating officer, head of engineering and chief of product development. Under Mehrotra’s leadership SanDisk’s annual revenue peaked at $6.6 billion and the company sold for $16 billion in 2016 to Western Digital. With long experience leading a major memory manufacturer, Mehrotra is one of the most highly-qualified candidates possible to take over at Micron.
Outgoing CEO Mark Durcan will be stepping down as CEO and from the board of directors effective May 8 but plans to stay on as an advisor until early August. Mehrotra plans to divide his time between Micron headquarters in Boise, Idaho and Micron’s Silicon Valley offices in Milpitas, California, a few blocks from SanDisk headquarters.
Last week, we took a look at Intel’s first product based on their 3D XPoint non-volatile memory technology: the Optane SSD DC P4800X, a record-breaking flagship enterprise SSD. Today Intel launches the first consumer product under the Optane brand: the Intel Optane Memory, a far smaller device with a price that is 20 times cheaper. Despite having “Memory” in its name, this consumer Optane Memory product is not a NVDIMM nor is it in any other way a replacement for DRAM. Instead, it is a very small (16GB or 32GB) but very fast NVMe SSD for use as a cache device in front of slower SATA storage.
Last week, we took a look at Intel’s first product based on their 3D XPoint non-volatile memory technology: the Optane SSD DC P4800X, a record-breaking flagship enterprise SSD. Today Intel launches the first consumer product under the Optane brand: the Intel Optane Memory, a far smaller device with a price that is 20 times cheaper. Despite having “Memory” in its name, this consumer Optane Memory product is not a NVDIMM nor is it in any other way a replacement for DRAM. Instead, it is a very small (16GB or 32GB) but very fast NVMe SSD for use as a cache device in front of slower SATA storage.
Intel’s new 3D XPoint non-volatile memory technology, which has been on the cards publically for the last couple of years, is finally hitting the market as the storage medium for Intel’s new flagship enterprise storage platform. The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X is a PCIe SSD using the standard NVMe protocol, but the use of 3D XPoint memory instead of NAND flash memory allows it to deliver great throughput and much lower access latency than any other NVMe SSD. In this review, we go deep to see if it really works as it should.