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Intel has announced at IDF 2015 that it will bring its new 3D Xpoint memory to market next year under the brand name Optane. These new SSDs won’t just debut in enterprise or business-class hardware as we initially expected; Intel is promising to bring them to the consumer market as well. The company is planning to launch hardware in both PCIe-compatible form factors for ultrabook systems and servers, to a DIMM-compatible option for Xeon systems that offers even greater capacities and lower latency.

The 7x performance claim is from Intel’s own tech demo, which showed IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second) at a queue depth of 1. That’s significant, because inflating queue depth is one way that marketing teams vastly exaggerate how much throughput an SSD or HDD can actually provide. Larger queue depths means that there are more outstanding access requests. This allows the drive to arrange its access patterns in a way that will maximize throughput, though typically at the expense of latency. SSD manufacturers often test at a queue depth of 32, even though no desktop software will ever reasonably hit that high a queue depth.

By testing a queue depth of 1, Intel is essentially giving notice that its performance in this mode is very, very fast. Intel showed multiple demos, as reported by Anandtech, and apparently the Optane drive is 5-7x faster than its PCI-Express-based DC P3700 in every benchmark. Of course, what this will mean for real-world scenarios is an entirely different story — in many cases, a 5-7x performance gap may not be very visible, since SSDs retrieve data quickly enough that improving them further may fall below the threshold of human perception.

3D Xpoint’s improved latency and throughput will matter in enterprise and workstation workloads, but they aren’t the only selling points. Intel is claiming that the new memory type is over 1,000x more durable than NAND flash and consumes a fraction of the power. Altogether, these are huge gains.

We don’t expect these products to come cheap, even if Intel is launching them into consumer markets in 2016. Optane drives will include a specialized software stack, Intel’s custom storage controllers, and the 3D Xpoint memory itself. Even if the memory is cheaper and much faster than NAND flash, Intel and Micron have every reason to milk this particular cash cow while other memory manufacturers scramble to catch up. Exactly what 3D Xpoint is remains a topic of some debate; Intel has claimed that it’s not phase change memory. It may be based on ReRAM technology, which is currently being developed by a number of vendors. Most ReRAM built to date has relied on transistors (which 3D Xpoint doesn’t do) but it’s possible to build ReRAM in other ways.

Between the intrinsic costs of launching a brand-new technology and the corporate desire to capture initial profits at a premium, NAND flash is going to have a solid life ahead of it. With Samsung and other companies now pushing up to 48 layers of 3D NAND stacked per device, the relatively small capacity of 3D Xpoint, at 128Gb per chip, will still have to improve to match the economics of 3D NAND.