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Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

intel.com

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Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#41

Post by petra »

slizard wrote: post #33
2bluesc wrote: post #16

Anandtech, as usual, has a good article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11227/intel-launches-optane-me... > The Optane Memory products are squeezing into a relatively small niche for limited budgets that require a lot of storage and want the benefit of solid state performance without paying the full price of a boot SSD. Intel notes that Optane Memory caching can be used in front of hybrid drives and SATA SSDs, but the…

Partly it is just marketing fluff, Intel trying to save their face and hoping that most will not remember the promises of revolutionary product while what they released is barely evolutionary. Can't find a better article right now than this SEmiaccurate rant [1] which is quite inflammatory, but does not push falsehoods AFAICT. But Intel has essentially walked back from the 100-1000x improvements it initially claimed…

I understand why Intel claimed 100-1000x improvement: it's great for the stock. But what happens now if it's not true, will the stock loose all that gain ? or some of that gain will stay ?

And is it legal ?

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#42

Post by olavgg »

ak217 wrote: post #35

If I'm reading this right, this device is slower than a Samsung 960 Evo across the board ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/10833/the-samsung-960-evo-1tb-... ). It seems that when Intel started developing Optane, they didn't anticipate how much faster NVMe PCIe SSDs would become. Couple that with significant clock frequency headroom for DDR4, and this product really doesn't look competitive.

You're reading the wrong numbers. Try benchmarking with PostgreSQL's pg_test_fsync or with fio with the following options: --direct=1 --sync=1 --rw=write --bs=4k

Good random-write performance with 4k/8k blocks at QD1 is what matter for SSD's, not if they can write 2500MB/s to a volatile cache.

Recommended read http://www.sebastien-han.fr/blog/2014/10/10/ceph-how-to-test...

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#43

Post by nilanjonB »

2bluesc wrote: post #16

Anandtech, as usual, has a good article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11227/intel-launches-optane-me... > The Optane Memory products are squeezing into a relatively small niche for limited budgets that require a lot of storage and want the benefit of solid state performance without paying the full price of a boot SSD. Intel notes that Optane Memory caching can be used in front of hybrid drives and SATA SSDs, but the…

I'm wondering what market their actually aiming for? non-NVMe drive users?

If the gains aren't that significant, why would people buy it and why would PC maker want to use it?

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#46

Post by tetraodonpuffer »

it seems this would be a great use case for DAWs and sample libraries in general, many many small files to be accessed with extremely low latency: this could make it possible to run large orchestral templates fully purged at all times, which would be a great use case when your template has hundreds of GB of samples but you only use a few of them at a time.

This is already kind of doable with SSD, but if optane has an order of magnitude less access time it would of course make it even better for this use case.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#47

Post by convolvatron »

valarauca1 wrote: post #23
freeone3000 wrote: post #5

It looks to be an accelerator cache for HDDs, but slower than an SSD, with fairly low capacity. And it requires a 7th gen intel processor, so this isn't a performance boost for older PCs either. Exactly who is this aimed at?

Nobody. You lose SSD transfer speed, while gain _some_ hardware response latency. NVMe response latency (on hardware side, not OS) is around 14-15micro-seconds on reads, and tops out at 200micro-seconds on writes [1]. Which is nearly 2-3 orders of magnitude below spinning rust. While Optane can halve this to 7micro-seconds on reads. The price/pref vs established NVMe tech is non-existent. When I can spend $X/GB to ge…

seems like it might be useful as a transaction log?

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#48

Post by mrjones »

valarauca1 wrote: post #23
freeone3000 wrote: post #5

It looks to be an accelerator cache for HDDs, but slower than an SSD, with fairly low capacity. And it requires a 7th gen intel processor, so this isn't a performance boost for older PCs either. Exactly who is this aimed at?

Nobody. You lose SSD transfer speed, while gain _some_ hardware response latency. NVMe response latency (on hardware side, not OS) is around 14-15micro-seconds on reads, and tops out at 200micro-seconds on writes [1]. Which is nearly 2-3 orders of magnitude below spinning rust. While Optane can halve this to 7micro-seconds on reads. The price/pref vs established NVMe tech is non-existent. When I can spend $X/GB to ge…

Actually, the linked paper discusses 112-115us of total read latency for NVMe SSD, not 14-15 (see Figure 5).

90us of raw device latency, then software overhead of 22-25us (2-3us driver, 6-7us kernel, 14-15us user space).

So, the 6us access latency quoted in the Anandtech article would be significantly faster than NVMe SSD.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#50

Post by [deleted] »

2bluesc wrote: post #20
2bluesc wrote: post #16

Anandtech, as usual, has a good article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11227/intel-launches-optane-me... > The Optane Memory products are squeezing into a relatively small niche for limited budgets that require a lot of storage and want the benefit of solid state performance without paying the full price of a boot SSD. Intel notes that Optane Memory caching can be used in front of hybrid drives and SATA SSDs, but the…

Interesting comment from Anandtech [0] > Keep in mind that consumer NVMe SSDs that boast throughput of 2GB/s or more generally do not reach their peak at low queue depth. Optane is supposed to be able to drive 1200MB/s read throughput at low queue depth (not sure why they listed QD4), so there is potential for some performance improvement here. Most consumer workloads never get out of low queue depth territory, so th…

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