Intel doubles 3D XPoint Optane DC P4800X capacities

Intel has announced the doubling of capacity for its Optane 3D XPoint solid-state storage products, beginning with the company's DC P4800X data centre targeted range - with, sadly, no word on when it might do the same for its consumer implementations.

Originally scheduled to launch in 2016 and finally launching in March this year in both data centre and consumer flavours, 3D XPoint is a joint venture between Intel and Micron which aims to produce a non-volatile storage medium which could, eventually, replace volatile dynamic RAM (DRAM) as a universal storage device.

The company's first products, though, were somewhat capacity-limited: The DC P4800X, which can be used as both storage or RAM, topped out at 375GB, and while the tiny 32GB caching modules for consumers have now been joined by the SSD 900P range at up to 480GB the capacities on offer still lag behind traditional NAND flash devices.

That's all set to change, however, with Intel announcing that it has doubled the capacity of its DC P4800X family - meaning that a doubling of its consumer products will logically follow. Available in both PCI Express add-in card and U.2 form factors, the new Optane SSD DC P4800X 750GB models double the capacity over their predecessors while still being able to operate as either storage or RAM expansion - a feature missing from their consumer-grade equivalents.

Sadly, Intel has not offered pricing information on the new models, though it has indicated they will begin arriving at suppliers later this month.