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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

#61

Post by searchfaster »

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…

Thanks ! Finally a place to lookup pricing information.

Also if you are already mmap'ing some big file which needs frequent access, I do not see how this will help ?

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#62

Post by tw04 »

Joeri wrote: post #54
slizard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You have to remember thus is a first gen product. Early ssd's were abysmal.

No, they really weren't. Early CHEAP SSDs from the likes of OCZ were horrible. I STILL have the first Intel SSD I bought - 80GB. It was awesome then and it's still awesome now. It's probably half the speed of modern SSDs, but even then it was several orders of magnitude better than any spinning rust that came before it.

The first gen SLC - from the likes of STEC were as fast if not faster than anything we have now, they were just ridiculously overpriced.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#63

Post by bbulkow »

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?

1. It is faster than an SSD - at low queue depths, or if you are writing a lot - in its Optane NVMe form factor.

2. In the NVMe form factor, it supports older CPUs.

3. In the DIMM form factor, it will be far, far faster than NVMe, but intel isn't saying when those are coming.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#64

Post by bbulkow »

smlacy wrote: post #3

Quite a bit of marketing-speak here on the official site, without a lot of technical details. I know the Optane SSD drives are fast -- is this just device-side driver software that allows you to virtually expand available "RAM" and mmap it to the SSD? Why just i7 CPUs? Is there a hardware component? "Just download and install the driver..." (Linux?)

Some of us have technical details, and put them out during the press event. The fact that Intel is staying high level is annoying, I admit, but they want "the community" to speak up, when you start using these drives.

I have tested on these devices, as a datastore for databases, and it has benefits. If you're writing a lot, and/or are very latency sensitive.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#65

Post by m-j-fox »

tw04 wrote: post #62
Joeri wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to remember thus is a first gen product. Early ssd's were abysmal.

No, they really weren't. Early CHEAP SSDs from the likes of OCZ were horrible. I STILL have the first Intel SSD I bought - 80GB. It was awesome then and it's still awesome now. It's probably half the speed of modern SSDs, but even then it was several orders of magnitude better than any spinning rust that came before it. The first gen SLC - from the likes of STEC were as fast if not faster than anything we have now, t…

My disused Thinkpad x200 still has her My SSD Rocks sticker. But her SSD has been recycled into the media nuc.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#66

Post by Andys »

smlacy wrote: post #3

Quite a bit of marketing-speak here on the official site, without a lot of technical details. I know the Optane SSD drives are fast -- is this just device-side driver software that allows you to virtually expand available "RAM" and mmap it to the SSD? Why just i7 CPUs? Is there a hardware component? "Just download and install the driver..." (Linux?)

Apparently it can present itself as actual system RAM to the host, in a different NUMA segment to the CPU.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#67

Post by lallysingh »

searchfaster wrote: post #61
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…

Thanks ! Finally a place to lookup pricing information. Also if you are already mmap'ing some big file which needs frequent access, I do not see how this will help ?

This. A RAM based cache sounds substantially more performant. I think this may be for clients that can't do much more than swap hardware to make their setup faster. Either it's a lack of control over their OS setup, or a desire to fine-tune caching for a specific device, or a lack of ability to change existing settings.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#68

Post by mtgx »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #53

The 'win' in theory for this stuff is that it is much faster than SSDs at low queue depths and it is significantly more write tolerant. An interesting interesting system design might be a 2GB main memory with a 32GB swap partition on this device. That would be interesting because in idle mode it uses less power than an equivalent amount of DDR memory. So you could potentially build a laptop with good performance on l…

> Intel's claim has been in the past that its density can exceed SSDs by a healthy margin

Seems doubtful they would reach that goal until SSDs hit some kind of hard plateau (kind of like HDDs did).

Toshiba plans to make a 100TB SSD over the next couple of years, and I believe Samsung has already announced a 16TB SSD. I doubt 3D Xpoint can catch-up with those in the given time frame.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#69

Post by wmf »

amluto wrote: post #57

I think you can (pending driver support?) plug one of these in and memory map it. On Linux, this means you'd see it as a "DAX" filesystem, and if you mmap(2) a file, you get a bona fide direct mapping of the hardware into your address space. This is very cool and would enable some interesting database-ish use cases. I'll believe it when I see the spec and the code.

This is a regular SSD, not a DIMM. It's not memory.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#70

Post by runeks »

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…

As far as I know, SSDs are closer to 0.1 ms latency (~10,000 random read IOPS at zero queue depth). That's still an improvement of more than an order of magnitude, though (0.009 ms according to the article).
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