E for All 2008: Preview of Fusion-io’s ioXtreme

On the more technical side of E for All, Fusion-io featured their new ioXtreme that is headed straight for consumer markets. To promote it, their booth featured a bull riding exhibit, that was less bull and more hard drive. Shoes were flying as they were thrown off the “crashing hard drive.”

I had the wonderful opportunity to interview CTO, David Flynn. He explained what the ioXtreme is and how it is the future of computers.

Basics of the Tech:

Utilizing NAND Technology, a type of flash memory, ioXtreme is an 80 GB PCI-Express card that you can use for various purposes. Traditional hard drives store their data on discs. The discs spin and are written/read by a laser. The transistors in RAM are filled with energy and hold our information. When the energy stops, the data disappears.

NAND is similar to what we use in our iPhones or MP3 players. They are fast and store our data long term.

So in layman’s terms: The ioXtreme is like a giant RAM stick that you plug into a PCI-Express (4x) and can use as a hard drive. You get the speed of RAM but the capacity of a hard drive.

Why this is awesome:

The ioXtreme booth had 4 monitors with 256 small screens, each running an episode of Stargate. They were running all episodes each at DVD quality at the same time, from one drive. According to David, this was only a quarter of the ioXtreme’s horsepower.

“Disk drives are inspired by Thomas Edison’s phonograph spinning around discs. Disk drives were created 50 years ago, and not much has changed. The performance hasn’t really gotten better…they spin it faster…In the last 20 years the time it takes to find a piece of data has improved is 12x…while your processor is 2 million times faster than it was 20 years ago.”

David explains that hard drives are what really bottleneck your computer, and really what is holding you back from harnessing the true power of your computer. There is a lot of idle time caused by the limitations of hard drives. It is so bad that AMD and Intel’s real innovations recently have been making the CPUs more energy efficient while idle.

They gave us a demonstration, saving a high res banner (750mb) in Photoshop: the regular hard drive took 4 minutes, while the ioXtreme took 40 seconds.

If your operating system is installed on the ioXtreme, your computer takes more time to post and have BIOS check your computer’s configuration, than for the OS to start. It is capable of booting 4 virtual machines faster than the BIOS check.

Sure, you can RAID a few hard drives together, but David tells us that you would need a whole rack and need to spend upwards of a million dollars (!) before it would compete with the ioXtreme.

The ioXtreme is like a Solid State Drive, so it has no moving parts. Your computer will stay significantly cooler and quieter, since there are no vibrations.

Who this is for:

The ioXtreme was originally built for supercomputing on level with Wall Street Servers. They are now introducing themselves to the consumer market for those who power use their computers. These are best for people who move enormous files. Graphic Designers of the 3D and 2D nature will benefit a lot from the ioXtreme.

All your programs’ load times are decimated by the ioXtreme. Those who multitask with taxing programs will see a huge performance boost, especially if they utilize the ioXtreme as virtual memory (80 GB of RAM!).

How much and where:

These will be sold in online retail shops for a price under $1000.

How I feel as a Gamer and a Computer Nerd:

As cool as this new technology is, I felt it out of place at E for All. While everyone else is debuting games and performance enhancers for in-game activities, ioXtreme offers faster load times. Faster load times are great…but not for $1000.

I do have Photoshop projects that are in high resolution so I can see how this would be helpful if I was constantly in front of the computer running large programs all the time. The ioXtreme is more for professionals and enthusiasts than consumers. By enthusiast, I mean artists who work digitally in enormous file sizes.

Even though the performance improvements are obscene, gamers care more about frame rates and resolution than they do about load time. I’ll also bet that a gamer would rather get SLI 3 mid-range video cards than buy an 80 GB stick of ram.

The Future:

I don’t see this being a practical purchase for any gamer, but I do look forward to this technology. This will get cheaper as time goes on. Only when the price is closer to the $200-300 range will consumers invest in such an upgrade.