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Rest in Peace, Optane

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Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#11

What was interesting about Optane was that it was kinda an attempt to get rid of disk and ram distinction. You had single device (optane stick) which served as both - ram and disk. After decades of current approach we finally could physically get rid of disks - hdds, ssds or even nvme sticks. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella... >Optane presented a radical, transformative technology but bec…

So the winning move now is for Apple to announce iOptane and sweep the data storage and cache industries by storm?

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#13
post #11

What was interesting about Optane was that it was kinda an attempt to get rid of disk and ram distinction. You had single device (optane stick) which served as both - ram and disk. After decades of current approach we finally could physically get rid of disks - hdds, ssds or even nvme sticks. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella... >Optane presented a radical, transformative technology but bec…

So the winning move now is for Apple to announce iOptane and sweep the data storage and cache industries by storm?

Apple may already be headed in that direction. They already have unified CPU and GPU RAM. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that they could unify persistent storage and memory.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#14

What was interesting about Optane was that it was kinda an attempt to get rid of disk and ram distinction. You had single device (optane stick) which served as both - ram and disk. After decades of current approach we finally could physically get rid of disks - hdds, ssds or even nvme sticks. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella... >Optane presented a radical, transformative technology but bec…

Yeah - the article was talking about mmap... but what i wanted was to not have to define persistence boundary. I wanted the entire in-memory state of my program to be persisted - perhaps even duplicated and moved elsewhere

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#15
post #4

Optane SSDs are really special and still have a place. SLC is 30 microseconds at best, FIO puts my 905p optane drive at 5-11 microseconds. That means for a single threaded latency bound task, a 905p may finish it 6 times faster than an SLC ssd. 20 times faster than MLC! Edit - wrong prefix sorry!

Maybe your fio is hitting RAM? fio for 905p / p5800x is usually low micros. Order of magnitude faster than other nvme but not as fast as RAM.

Even hitting RAM takes the best part of 100ns. They probably mean 5-10us given the ‘6x faster’ thing.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#16
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your fio is hitting RAM? fio for 905p / p5800x is usually low micros. Order of magnitude faster than other nvme but not as fast as RAM.

Even hitting RAM takes the best part of 100ns. They probably mean 5-10us given the ‘6x faster’ thing.

50ns is typical with overclocked desktop RAM

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#17
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe your fio is hitting RAM? fio for 905p / p5800x is usually low micros. Order of magnitude faster than other nvme but not as fast as RAM.

Even hitting RAM takes the best part of 100ns. They probably mean 5-10us given the ‘6x faster’ thing.

do you have your fio benchmark / args handy? i would love to get sub-micro out of optane, even if it's only on paper

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#18

My HP laptop came with optane memory, as far as I could tell, it was nothing special. I eventually pulled it to upgrade to a Terabyte ssd

No your laptop did not come with a pure optane SSD; it came with a 32GB optane cache. The former's retail price was thousands of dollars while the latter was a joke

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#20
I feel that Optane is a missed opportunity due to economics - the cost of adapting our algorithms to multi layer storage (breaking the abstraction) is much more expensive then the economic benefits of nonvolatile "RAM". Perhaps the cloud was the Optane killer - who needs nvram when you can just up the number of machines
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