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

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

#81

Post by baq »

vitus wrote: post #74
jacquesm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not just this; HDD technology has been stagnating, while SSD technology still has yet to reach its full potential. In the last five years, HDDs haven't really gotten cheaper (other than market returning to pre-flooding equilibrium). On the other hand, SSDs have gotten easily 4x cheaper in that same period of time. Plus, since SSDs aren't using the latest process technology (as far as I'm aware), they still have a few…

shrinking transistor size may also mean reduced durability, so it's not all roses. we'll see.

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

#82

Post by imtringued »

nneonneo wrote: post #61
Koromix wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a great question. One way I imagine it: Short term, the disk controller becomes a peripheral on the memory bus. On a 64-bit x86-64 system, the top 16 bits of the address are either 0000 or ffff for RAM. Make it so that the prefix 1000 (for example) maps to the disk, so accessing (physical) address 1000000013371000 accesses byte 13371000 on the disk. Now processes can just ask the OS to perform a physical memo…

>Suddenly "serialization" to disk is no longer required

That's not true. You'd still want excel to just save your sheets as xls file and show it to a coworker as opposed to sharing the entire excel program state. Upgrading from one version to another also requires a stable persistent data format for things such as configurations.

Not to mention that you still need serialization to communicate over a network.

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

#83

Post by imtringued »

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…

For now. If you build it they will come. Things like these take time but they won't happen if the hardware guys don't move first.

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

#84

Post by imtringued »

gumby wrote: post #70

No discussion of power in the fluffy article; perhaps there was some in the youtube preso but it's impossible to search or skim that. This would definitely be a game changer if they can really ship it that quickly. It's funny that a SVP talked about notebooks rather than phones or servers, where this could possibly be more effective. That shows where Intel's head is, unfortunately. I wonder how it compares to the mem…

SSDs consume too much power for phones. That shows that intel doesn't believe in the $15 revenue per phone hype. Unless you are the manufacturer of the entire phone you won't see a worthwile amount of money coming your way.

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

#85

Post by kriro »

How do contracts with laptop producers usually work? Could they ship in consumer hardware by the end of the year if that's the stated availability or does it usually take longer? What are the chances that the Apple flagship (MBP) timing will be synched with this technology will be available (possibly as an option only, no idea if the pricepoint is prohibitive)?

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

#86

Post by wtallis »

vitus wrote: post #74
jacquesm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not just this; HDD technology has been stagnating, while SSD technology still has yet to reach its full potential. In the last five years, HDDs haven't really gotten cheaper (other than market returning to pre-flooding equilibrium). On the other hand, SSDs have gotten easily 4x cheaper in that same period of time. Plus, since SSDs aren't using the latest process technology (as far as I'm aware), they still have a few…

> Plus, since SSDs aren't using the latest process technology (as far as I'm aware), they still have a few more years of Moore's law ahead of them. Shrinking transistor size means increased density (and at lower cost, once you recoup the cost of the mask).

Nope. SSDs have already hit the wall and dug into it a ways. Everybody is doing 16nm/15nm NAND flash and struggling to get ~40nm 3D NAND out the door, but they can't beat the $/GB of planar NAND. Sub-20nm TLC flash has had serious problems with the data just plain leaking out of the memory cell, to say nothing of the scary low program/erase cycle counts. The only thing that really kept the SSD market advancing over the past year was the widespread adoption of better error correcting codes to cope with lower quality flash.

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

#87

Post by snuxoll »

baq wrote: post #81
vitus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just this; HDD technology has been stagnating, while SSD technology still has yet to reach its full potential. In the last five years, HDDs haven't really gotten cheaper (other than market returning to pre-flooding equilibrium). On the other hand, SSDs have gotten easily 4x cheaper in that same period of time. Plus, since SSDs aren't using the latest process technology (as far as I'm aware), they still have a few…

shrinking transistor size may also mean reduced durability, so it's not all roses. we'll see.

If we halve the size of NAND memory cells we can afford to allocate an additional 20% of them for reallocation when other cells fail. It's not a perfect solution by any means, but it is a solution to increase the lifespan nonetheless.

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

#88

Post by Synaesthesia »

imtringued wrote: post #84
gumby wrote: post #70

No discussion of power in the fluffy article; perhaps there was some in the youtube preso but it's impossible to search or skim that. This would definitely be a game changer if they can really ship it that quickly. It's funny that a SVP talked about notebooks rather than phones or servers, where this could possibly be more effective. That shows where Intel's head is, unfortunately. I wonder how it compares to the mem…

SSDs consume too much power for phones. That shows that intel doesn't believe in the $15 revenue per phone hype. Unless you are the manufacturer of the entire phone you won't see a worthwile amount of money coming your way.

Modern phones have very fast ssd's. Eg the iPhone 6S and Galaxy S6 have desktop class storage. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-i...

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

#89

Post by simula67 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #67
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…

Ok, a couple of things. First, I found it really amazing at how convoluted Intel plotted their numbers on that latency graph so that it would "Up and to the right" which everyone "knows" is good. The second thing is that Intel has been claiming multiple GB/second of throughput as well. They really do believe this will be a replacement for DRAM on some platforms. As in you read into your L3 case from this stuff and yo…

Is this technology costly ?

EDIT: Does not seem to be.

“You could put the cost somewhere between NAND and DRAM. Cost per bit, it’s likely to be in between them somewhere. But actual cost will result from the products we bring to the marketplace.”

http://hothardware.com/news/intel-and-micron-jointly-drop-di...

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

#90

Post by markokrajnc »

aeharding wrote: post #10
nashashmi wrote: post #3

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

One of the slides mentioned it as a technology that can "serve as system memory and storage."

This may really change software. In the mean time combine RAM and Optane SSD and you will get RAM read spead and permanent RAM storage...
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