Samsung claims that its new Samsung SZ985 SSD Z-NAND storage drive improves performance and latencies over traditional drives and competes directly with Intel Optane and 3D XPoint memory.
Currently in the storage market we find a problem and it is memory latency, which is a real headache. The increase in data transfer speeds thanks to NAND Flash memories is an important evolution over mechanical hard drives, but these memories have a significant problem and that is that they have a lot of latency, which causes significant bottlenecks. Samsung appears to have fixed this problem on the Samsung SZ985 SSD Z-NAND drives.
The only known solution that managed to break this problem is Intel's 3D XPoint memories, which are integrated into Optane memories. Intel's problem is that it has problems in the production of these memories and is only allocating them to the professional segment and the commercial Optane drives, they can only be used as a cache, which is silly, since it is unnecessary to speed up an SSD, since It offers good performance by itself and putting Optane with an HDD is pointless. Samsung, with its new Z-NAND memories, aims to solve these problems and bring high-performance units closer to the general market.
These new Z-NAND drives have the characteristic of being quite similar in performance to Optane's 3D XPoint, but in addition, they are much cheaper to manufacture than current NAND Flash, which allows a noticeable reduction in price. The SZ985 SSD Z-NAND drive is capable of offering a read and write speed of 3.2GB / s, in addition, in random read it offers 750.000IOPS, while in random write it offers 170.000IOPS. It assumes unprecedented performance for drives based on NAND memories.
Reducing latency has also been significantly improved, achieving this not only with these new Z-NAND memories, but also by introducing changes in the memory controller design. According to Samsung, they have managed to reduce latency by 5.5 times compared to NVMe SSDs, allowing faster and more efficient data loading. Nothing more is known about these units, it is possible that at CES 2018 more information about them.
Source: OC3D
It is really interesting and it seems that it would only be a matter of time before having a viable alternative to Optane, which at the moment has not overcome the obstacles to fully enter, on the other hand AMD has eternally had great problems with latencies and BMI ... surely It would be convenient for you to reach an agreement with Samsung for a Joinventure, although hahaha I don't know if AMD has something that interests Samsung