Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 97 posts

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#41

Post by problems »

chx wrote: post #36
cookiecaper wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting a dedicated box doesn't have that cool "we can scale INFINITELY!" vibe. ;)

YAGNI.

Exactly. The only time the cloud services really pay off are when you need to scale up or down massive capacity overnight. The odds of that happening at most companies are very, very slim, even most of the web companies.

If you're really concerned about that though, I'd say go for the cloud option - just make it so you can start small on a single physical server, but can scale onto the cloud, then migrate that to physical hardware as needed. With this set up, you save massive cash and avoid vendor lock-in.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#42

Post by Dylan16807 »

endorphone wrote: post #9
Analemma_ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not advertising it as universal memory or a DRAM replacement though, so I'm not sure why you would make that comparison. They're advertising it as sitting between RAM and an SSD on the storage hierarchy, and it seems to mostly deliver on that promise.

One of the proposed uses for 3D XPoint has been replacing system memory, owing to its extremely low latency (which it has already delivered), high throughput, where it's early, and supposed almost unimaginable reliability/rewrites. In DIMM form it wouldn't have the overhead of a storage controller, could hypothetically be very parallel, etc. It's extremely early in the technology, and I imagine we will get there. The…

> extremely low latency (which it has already delivered)

Are we looking at the same numbers? "probably under 10 microseconds" is pretty terrible compared to DRAM.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#43

Post by endorphone »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #42
endorphone wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the proposed uses for 3D XPoint has been replacing system memory, owing to its extremely low latency (which it has already delivered), high throughput, where it's early, and supposed almost unimaginable reliability/rewrites. In DIMM form it wouldn't have the overhead of a storage controller, could hypothetically be very parallel, etc. It's extremely early in the technology, and I imagine we will get there. The…

> extremely low latency (which it has already delivered) Are we looking at the same numbers? "probably under 10 microseconds" is pretty terrible compared to DRAM.

3D XPoint has extremely low latency (e.g. 7 usec), and has already been demonstrated as such. Putting it through a PCI slot and a storage controller is not the same. The discussion is about running it as DIMM memory through a normal memory controller.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#44

Post by mtanski »

agumonkey wrote: post #26
mtanski wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lives on in the save icon. But in all seriousness you're right, floppy as a medium for data storage is dead. Unless you're the US gov. According to Wikipedia: "In May 2016 the United States Government Accountability Office released a report that covered the need to upgrade or replace legacy computer systems within Federal Agencies. According to this document, old IBM Series/1 minicomputers running on 8-inch floppy…

Optical discs are relegated to back shelves too. Hard to beat cheap rewritable nand flash. ps: I'd be curious about a tiny, 2017 laptop friendly optical disc storage. Say a 2.5" RW BD layer in cartridge. A modern mini disc.

There are people using optical media for long term storage. So I am not counting it out as a storage medium. In my classification I would put it in cold storage tier.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#45

Post by Dylan16807 »

Crespyl wrote: post #38
frozenport wrote: post #27

At $5 per gb, I would instead buy RAM. Edit: why the downvotes? I'm currently doing image processing and using a ram drive with ~200GBs.

The reason you would use this over RAM is persistence, it doesn't need to stay powered to keep the data. If all you need is a massive amount of temporary storage for some algorithm, you'll still need RAM, but if you want a stupidly fast backing store for a huge amount of source and then output data, this is pretty incredible.

When your computation fits in RAM, what's the point of a lower latency backing store that does fewer gbps per dollar?

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#46

Post by Dylan16807 »

endorphone wrote: post #43
Dylan16807 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> extremely low latency (which it has already delivered) Are we looking at the same numbers? "probably under 10 microseconds" is pretty terrible compared to DRAM.

3D XPoint has extremely low latency (e.g. 7 usec), and has already been demonstrated as such. Putting it through a PCI slot and a storage controller is not the same. The discussion is about running it as DIMM memory through a normal memory controller.

So you remove the storage controller and PCIe bus and you go from 10us to 7us. 7us is still a hundred times slower than DRAM, is it not?

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#47

Post by utternerd »

Toast_ wrote: post #10
dboreham wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has always been the case that owned metal is much cheaper than cloud. Cloud wins for things like very small machines (you can't buy 20% of a metal box); temporary deployments; and startups where the investors don't want to be on the hook for big $$ capex that they end up needing to shift on eBay post flame-out. Also where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) and where for whateve…

>where you just don't have the ability to run hardware (increasingly the case) Softlayer has 'on demand' bare metal plans. I'm not sure how cost effective it would be compared compared to running your own box, but the simplicity is nice and they had me up and running in under 2 hours (assembled with customizations). http://www.softlayer.com/bare-metal-servers

As a customer, I can tell you we're very, very happy (Singapore SoftLayer, our Asian DC). No upfront capex, I can add or subtract hardware as necessary (I can say the same, they usually take about 2 hours to have it up and configured as requested), and my favorite benefit is when new hardware is available, we just spin up new servers and retire the old ones; bill ends up being the ~same.

It runs substantially cheaper than our colo here in Irvine, but that's also not apples-to-apples. That said, I don't plan on continuing with colos unless there's a pressing reason, after almost 15 years of them being my default. Bare Metal is the sweet spot in my eyes, the benefits of cloud without the downside of shared/inconsistent resources.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#48

Post by mtanski »

kabdib wrote: post #32
klodolph wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit conspicuous how you mention good ECC for printing stuff out, since good ECC is a staple of many forms of storage (especially hard drives, optical drives, tape) and we don't mention e.g. "storing bits on spinning rust with good ECC and reading it back in again". I think the problem with paper is thot it's not really part of the computer any more. You need a human to take the paper out of the printer…

I hadn't thought of that. Your average "crappy thumb drive" probably has more ECC than you'd need on a physical piece of paper. You're right.

Although when crappy thumb drives fail the whole thing tends to be unreadable or doesn't even show up as a USB device.

Generally no amount of ECC will help the default failure mode of these.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#49

Post by _wmd »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #46
endorphone wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3D XPoint has extremely low latency (e.g. 7 usec), and has already been demonstrated as such. Putting it through a PCI slot and a storage controller is not the same. The discussion is about running it as DIMM memory through a normal memory controller.

So you remove the storage controller and PCIe bus and you go from 10us to 7us. 7us is still a hundred times slower than DRAM, is it not?

You're ignoring a lot of context being created by the parent comment. While the latencies may never directly compete with DRAM, planned densities are already more than favourable. Having a 2TB chunk of persistent memory mapped into your address space with single-thread performance exceeding 100,000 random reads/sec with extremely consistent latency is a game-changer in for example database applications.

Re: The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance

#50

Post by hackuser »

mtanski wrote: post #25
agumonkey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My floppies would like to have a word with you.

It lives on in the save icon. But in all seriousness you're right, floppy as a medium for data storage is dead. Unless you're the US gov. According to Wikipedia: "In May 2016 the United States Government Accountability Office released a report that covered the need to upgrade or replace legacy computer systems within Federal Agencies. According to this document, old IBM Series/1 minicomputers running on 8-inch floppy…

On one hand, people complain about government spending. On the other, they complain about government's old equipment.
Post reply on HN