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Rest in Peace, Optane

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Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#41

Post by jiggawatts »

lstodd wrote: post #38
sgt101 wrote: post #31

I worked at a telco when Optane was announced and launched; we had an Intel account manager and quarterly business meetings with them. I lobbied hard for some samples, but they simply would not provide them. I think that if we were representative of how they acted this may be the reason they never got buyin. If we had had those parts maybe we would have implemented the POC's we were planning, and those POC's may have…

Yeah, this. Intel was all talk and zero samples, not even a demo. So back then we just shrugged and moved on.

Literally unoptaneium?

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#42

Post by wuxb »

Great article that gets to the key points. The problem with "persistent memory bus" is a very bad sign by itself. This means no existing software/systems can benefit from the feature without writing some new code between the volatile/persistent boundry. It's too much of an effort for a "not much faster" device. RIP.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#44

Post by Aardwolf »

hardware2win wrote: post #6

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…

I had a calculator from the early 90s like that, the HP 48GX, 128K RAM, but it kept it storage when shutting it off and on again. Certainly very convenient!

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#45

Post by PedroBatista »

sgt101 wrote: post #31

I worked at a telco when Optane was announced and launched; we had an Intel account manager and quarterly business meetings with them. I lobbied hard for some samples, but they simply would not provide them. I think that if we were representative of how they acted this may be the reason they never got buyin. If we had had those parts maybe we would have implemented the POC's we were planning, and those POC's may have…

2015 was peak arrogance years for Intel. Even lifelong fanboys started to hate them, it was just too much.

In the end optane was a “cool, nice to know and play around” product with a real market way smaller than Intel was prepared to support.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#46

Post by tanelpoder »

buildbot wrote: post #30
tanelpoder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mmap on Optane direct-access-aware (DAX) filesystems like EXT4/XFS now, is not like mmap on block devices where the OS gets in your way and pages stuff in from disk and (maybe) later syncs it back to persistent storage. Optane is the persistent storage, it's just usable/addressable as regular RAM as it's plugged in to DIMM slots. And in the later Xeon architecture (Xeon Scalable 3rd gen, I think), intel expanded the…

There are also fully optane based SSDs such as the 905p or the 5800x

Yes, which made it even more confusing, why call the Optane-cached consumer NAND disks "memory" ... but perhaps they thought that it's easier to fool the consumer segment (?)

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#47

Post by gumby »

ddalex wrote: post #21
zinodaur wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But then you can't just reset the state when crashes happen and data corrupts

This shouldn’t be voted down. This problem, in the more general case, was inherent at the system level with the persistent and PARC’s immersive Smalltalk and Interlisp environments on the D-Machines. It was much better to have full source you could reload into a fresh environment.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#48

Post by satiric »

ritwikgupta wrote: post #13
Dalewyn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well technically, Intel and AMD both use the regular system RAM for their integrated graphics VRAM, but I see what you mean.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#49

Post by gumby »

The 1960s memory models of current programming languages were as much a problem as the OSes since since the benefits of persistent programming require slightly different thinking.

This reminds me of running Unix on the Cray X-MP. It worked, but was very slow since calling a function stalled these superpipelined machines designed to run FORTRAN really fast.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#50

Post by eternityforest »

DeathArrow wrote: post #36
eternityforest wrote: post #27

Why was everyone so obsessed with the idea of Optane as universal memory? From a consumer perspective, it was a fast small SSD that doesn't wear out. That was enough to justify it's value at the prices it went for(Or at least it seems like it, I never personally used it). It didn't need any radical rethink of computing to be worth it. I'm not even a fan of the nonvolatile RAM idea. Rebooting is often the first thing…

I think the idea is to have large persistent storage with the speeds of RAM. Everything would open instantly.

That would be useful, but it wouldn't really replace RAM, or, if it did, we'd probably still wipe it every boot, to be in a known state.

Outside of some specialized database applications, having an entire program running right in persistent memory seems like a bad idea.

And even then, I'm assuming databases would still want strong separation between persistent stuff and stuff that can be restarted any moment, to minimize the surface area for problems to stay persistent in.

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