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

Post by loeg » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 8:26 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #17

loeg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Post by 1024core » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

bluecalm wrote: post #16

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 :)

Post by MustardTiger » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 8:41 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #13

erik wrote: 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.

Post by MustardTiger » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 8:42 PM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #6

The 1,000x speed is so ridiculously misleading. It's basically comparing it to the slowest microSD on Earth...from a few years ago. I doubt the speed will be more than a few times faster than the current fastest NVMe SSDs (if that), and it will probably be even more expensive per Gbps (and per GB, too) than SSDs are. But it could still find some success in niche markets initially, if it has much better endurance and…

Post by wmf » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 8:50 PM UTC

Koromix wrote: post #27

nneonneo wrote: post #21

To be perfectly clear: the 1000x claim isn't about throughput , but latency . The graph in the article makes this clear: spinning drives have latencies on the order of 10ms, NAND flash about 10us, and DRAM about 1ns. The claim is that Optane will achieve latencies on the order of 10ns, or 1000x better than NAND. The on-stage benchmark shows a write throughput of about 2GB/s, which is a much more modest improvement ov…

Consumer OS I/O software stacks are completely unable to deal with this. It was fine for spinning drive latency, it's okay(ish) for high-performance SSD but the open/read/write model just cannot work that fast. It's several orders of magnitude off. Assuming we keep the file system model, I'm guessing some kind of direct memory mapping is in order? Anyone knows what's ahead of us on the software side, to take advantag…