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

computerworld.com

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

#41

Post by daveguy »

olavgg wrote: post #15
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…

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...

nitpick: iops is I/O operations per second. iops per second is redundant -- would be like FLOPS per second.

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

#43

Post by zer00eyz »

jacquesm wrote: post #29
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…

It's a game changer either way, and it will be one more nail in the coffin of anything mechanical.

For consumer, and "online" hardware I fully agree, but were going to have tape for a long time to come.

As a medium, for offline, offsite it still reigns king. Density, reliably, and durability remain high, vs platter based drives or SSD.

I know of at least two companies that keep tape going for compliance reasons. At the end of each year, they do a pretty large archival snapshot, and send it off to storage. It will remain there till some lawyer asks for it, and will most likely end up copied by a third party for the sake of integrity.

For one of them, the archive tapes are becoming a concern, the media is fine, but finding hardware is going to become a problem.

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

#44

Post by acqq »

baq wrote: post #38

so if you solder this accelerator onto a motherboard and make it a few times larger than your RAM, you get a super-low-latency L5-ish cache (where RAM is L4-ish) and, potentially, an ability to instantenously suspend and keep suspended without consuming any power at all, assuming RAM is mostly in the Optane cache at all times. sounds nice.

If it still suffers from the limited number of the write cycles, if it's even a few orders of magnitude more it still can't be used instead of RAM, but still just instead of the disk.

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

#45

Post by agumonkey »

maxerickson wrote: post #25
rudolf0 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm almost afraid to see what hardware will look like in 10 years.

Don't even think about the software it will take to make it feel slow.

I'm rooting for the crapware camp to find new theories on how to make things slow.

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

#46

Post by gpderetta »

nneonneo wrote: post #35
gjulianm wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, why do you say that the open/read/write model can't work? I suppose that current software should be optimized to take advantage of better performance, but I don't see why it is obsolete.

10ns latency means that a file entry/inode/block is available just 10-30 CPU cycles after it is requested. Suddenly the 1000 CPU cycles spent dispatching the system call look very inefficient by comparison. Obsolete might not be the right term, but there is essentially no way that open/read/write can take proper advantage of this kind of low latency storage. We are going to need a new way to abstract and interface wi…

Or a way to make system calls faster, some sort of vdso with the ability to switch privilege level.

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

#47

Post by Joeri »

jacquesm wrote: post #29
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…

It's a game changer either way, and it will be one more nail in the coffin of anything mechanical.

SSD's haven't displaced drives for bulk data center storage because it's all about $/GB and although SSD's are getting cheaper, spinning disks got cheaper in the same way. Intel is not going to compete on price, but on performance. So rest assured that spinning disks will be with us for a while.

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

#48

Post by jacquesm »

Joeri wrote: post #47
jacquesm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a game changer either way, and it will be one more nail in the coffin of anything mechanical.

SSD's haven't displaced drives for bulk data center storage because it's all about $/GB and although SSD's are getting cheaper, spinning disks got cheaper in the same way. Intel is not going to compete on price, but on performance. So rest assured that spinning disks will be with us for a while.

Bulk data is the key there, for many other use cases servers are already using SSDs and once the economies of scale will cause another order of magnitude decrease in cost I think spinning disks will be much more expensive in $/GB than SSDs. Chips are cheap, robust, quite dense and should have a much longer operating life than anything mechanical. The writing is on the platters.

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

#49

Post by soganess »

sorenjan wrote: post #19
nashashmi wrote: post #3

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

Hewlett Packard Labs is working on something like that: http://www.labs.hpe.com/research/themachine/

I was HPE Discover and while HP Labs had a pretty big presence, "the machine"(what a name, huh?) was less present. In previous years, it was more center-stage. I am obviously overreaching, but that isn't a good sign.

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

#50

Post by marcusarmstrong »

Joeri wrote: post #47
jacquesm wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a game changer either way, and it will be one more nail in the coffin of anything mechanical.

SSD's haven't displaced drives for bulk data center storage because it's all about $/GB and although SSD's are getting cheaper, spinning disks got cheaper in the same way. Intel is not going to compete on price, but on performance. So rest assured that spinning disks will be with us for a while.

I could see a world in which that changes due to a significant jump in reliability. If these chips are truly 1000x winners in write cycles, that changes the math significantly in terms of $/GB/hr, which is truly the important number for large scale data center storage.
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