A new generation of Intel DIMMS coming next year from Intel promise to make memory big, affordable, and persistent. At the SAP Sapphire conference in Orlando, Intel presented the first public demo of the technology.

This new generation of Intel persistent memory, based on the 3D XPoint media developed by Intel and Micron, has been designed for data centers and will offer higher application capacity and performance, according to Intel's Lisa Davis, Vice President of IT Transformation.

The new memory will allow users to improve system performance by putting more data closer to the processor on nonvolatile media, and do it in an affordable manner.

Intel demonstrated SAP's HANA in-memory data analytics platform working with Intel persistent memory. It's fitting that an SAP application should be showcased in the public debut of the new DIMMs because Intel and SAP have partnered on a persistent memory vision for many years.

More data in-memory equates to better, faster insights and more business velocity. And because data remains in-memory through power cycles, restart times are a fraction of the loading times from disk, for more HANA service uptime.

Of course, it's not just in-memory databases that will reap the benefit of Intel persistent memory when it becomes available next year. The new DIMMs enable more use cases across data center segments, from mass-scale virtualization and private clouds in the enterprise to, cloud hosting, and search offerings in public cloud environments. The new technology will also help accelerate the performance and capacity of high performance computing (HPC) applications and software-defined storage.

Intel expects to ship its persistent memory solution in 2018 with a processor refresh of the Intel Xeon Scalable family platform, code-named Cascade Lake.

Upcoming Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family shows 1.59x Performance Improvement

Intel also today unveiled performance advances in its upcoming Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family. At the SAP Sapphire NOW conference, Intel showed up to 1.59x higher Intel Xeon processor performance running in-memory SAP HANA workloads over the generation it replaces.

Diane Bryant, group president of the Data Center Group at Intel, outlined how the Intel Xeon Processor Scalable family - available in mid-2017 - will provide enhanced performance to in-memory applications like SAP HANA.

Bryant also announced that SAP has certified HANA to support up to 6x greater system memory on the new Intel platform for 4- or 8-socket configurations over the representative installed base of systems available four years ago.