71–80 of 109 posts
How it compares to massive swapping to typical SSD?
Now imagine you open your laptop 8 or 12 times a day...
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It's faster than SATA SSD but slower than most NVMe M.2 SSDs: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11227/intel-launches-optane-me... . Because of when this was launched, and the fact it only works with newer processors that also support NVMe, by the time it is at all common place, so would M.2 SSDs, making it a weird concept. It's essentially the most expensive per GB NVMe drive, with worse performance, and some software to…
Except for the fact that it hits max throughput at way lower queue depths, is bit addressable, and it destroys mixed workloads since you can read while writing. I don't think it'll be revolutionary, but it will be quite nice for caching, databases, or even as a write cache using something like ZFS's zil, then flushing to NVMe SSDs
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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…
[1] http://techreport.com/review/17269/intel-second-generation-x...
Does anyone know whether this memory has limited cycle life like Flash?
It does. Somebody else linked to the Semiaccurate article higher in the comments where they discuss this. It looks as though the per-bit endurance of the Optane drive is a bit less than modern flash, but they counteract this by having the drive's firmware reserve some blocks that it can remap over failing blocks.
my understanding was one goal of this would be replacing DRAM with 3D XPOINT so theoretically your computer would have 1 TB of this new memory in its RAM slots.
Your understanding if a bit flawed, and largely based on marketting. Intel has hinted XPOINT will be usable in DRAM slots, but has yet to announce a product. Intel has stated XPOINT will replace DRAM buuut based on it's marketing material it won't. Having latencies go from 14nano-seconds to 9000nano-seconds isn't acceptable for a DRAM replacement.
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.
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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).
Reads are as low as 20micro-seconds [1] This is using an Samsung 860pro, so a generation behind the current generation.
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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?
Too small to provide much of an cache, when you can have 256GB of SSD for the same price.
It is a pity that the marketing docs don't address how this impacts on write consistency. Instant write sync is the primary advantage of hardware RAID, but still, how much better is this than a normal SSD?