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Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

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11–20 of 108 posts

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#11

If SSDs and RAM reach the same speeds, could RAM become obsolete? If so, architecture of computers will change drastically.

They might reach the same throughput before getting similar latency, in which case RAM will stick around for a while despite SSds having the same or higher 'speeds'

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#13
post #9

1,000x performance, but they are introducing it with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface? That is suspicious. And then they are going to follow with a lower cost PCIe 3.0 x2 version? (That they still label as an Enthusiast / Workstation product?) I wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market so that you have to pay a lot for the "enterprise" product to get the full performance. Or, alternatively, if the real world perf…

I wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market...

Intel always does this and Optane won't be any exception.

The "1,000x" claims are either at the chip level (e.g. NAND block erase vs. XPoint word write) or maybe some access pattern that is worst-case for flash. It's physically impossible to get 1,000x improvement on common access patterns.

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#14

If SSDs and RAM reach the same speeds, could RAM become obsolete? If so, architecture of computers will change drastically.

If 3d Xpoint is cheaper, lower latency, and higher throughput than DRAM, yes, it will obsolete DRAM. Currently it is higher latency, and lower throughput. And it is cheaper on a per-GB basis, but with a much higher minimum GB (like, 128GB).

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#15
post #9

1,000x performance, but they are introducing it with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface? That is suspicious. And then they are going to follow with a lower cost PCIe 3.0 x2 version? (That they still label as an Enthusiast / Workstation product?) I wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market so that you have to pay a lot for the "enterprise" product to get the full performance. Or, alternatively, if the real world perf…

Basically on a PCIe 3.0 x4 maximum performance is 4000GB/s, in practice this is 3200-3500MB/s. With 4k random write, you will get maximum 800.000 to 875.000 iops per second. Consumer-grade SSD's barely manage to write 500-1000 iops when sending the ATA_CMD_FLUSH command unless they are lying which is really bad.

Good read about consumer SSD performance: http://www.sebastien-han.fr/blog/2014/10/10/ceph-how-to-test...

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#17
post #14

If SSDs and RAM reach the same speeds, could RAM become obsolete? If so, architecture of computers will change drastically.

If 3d Xpoint is cheaper, lower latency, and higher throughput than DRAM, yes, it will obsolete DRAM. Currently it is higher latency, and lower throughput. And it is cheaper on a per-GB basis, but with a much higher minimum GB (like, 128GB).

DRAM doesn't wear though. Depending on your use case, you might not care if RAM is ephemeral. It just needs to be fast.

Re: Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

#18

So your run of the mill SSD these days is like 500MB/s. Dual channel RAM @ 1600Mhz with 64bit bus is: 2 * 8bytes * 1 600 000 000 = 25.6GB/sec 500MB 1000x faster would be 500GB/sec or about 20x faster than standard RAM. That puts the claim in perspective :)

500GB/Sec. the network is going to have to do some work to catch up to those speeds. We're going to see big iron replacing clusters until networking catches up.
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