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

What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

blog.zuthof.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 164 posts

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#91

Post by mort96 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #31
cogman10 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the reason they didn't sell is the ideal usage for them is pairing them with some slow spinning disks. The issue Optane had is that SSD capacity grew dramatically while the price plummeted. The difference between Optane and SSDs was too small. Especially since the M.2 standard proliferated and SSDs took advantage of PCI-E performance. I believe Optane retained a performance advantage (and I think even today it's…

That may have been the ideal usage back in the day , but ideal usage now is just for setting up swap. Write-heavy workloads are king with Optane, and threshing to swap is the prototypical example of something that's so write-heavy it's a terrible fit for NAND. Optane might not have been "as fast as DRAM" but it was plenty close enough to be fit for purpose.

That would be fine if I could put it in an M.2 slot. But all my computers already have RAM in their RAM slots, and even if I had a spare RAM slot, I don't know that I'd trust the software stack to treat one RAM slot as a drive...

And their whole deal was making RAM persistent anyway, which isn't exactly what I want.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#92

Post by zozbot234 »

mort96 wrote: post #91
zozbot234 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may have been the ideal usage back in the day , but ideal usage now is just for setting up swap. Write-heavy workloads are king with Optane, and threshing to swap is the prototypical example of something that's so write-heavy it's a terrible fit for NAND. Optane might not have been "as fast as DRAM" but it was plenty close enough to be fit for purpose.

That would be fine if I could put it in an M.2 slot. But all my computers already have RAM in their RAM slots, and even if I had a spare RAM slot, I don't know that I'd trust the software stack to treat one RAM slot as a drive... And their whole deal was making RAM persistent anyway, which isn't exactly what I want.

Optane M.2-format hardware exists.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#94

Post by LASR »

empiricus wrote: post #80
chrneu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Intel for a while and might be able to explain this. There were/are often projects that come down from management that nobody thinks are worth pursuing. When i say nobody, it might not just be engineers but even say 1 or 2 people in management who just do a shit roll out. There are a lot of layers of Intel and if even one layer in the Intel Sandwich drag their feet it can kill an entire project. I saw it…

This is actually insane. Do you mean 2-4 people in one department basically killed Intel? Roll to disbelief.

Yes this is pretty common in large enterprise-ey tech companies that are successful. There are usually a small group of vocal members that have a strong conviction and drive to make a vision a reality. This is contrary to popular belief that large companies design by committee.

Of course it works exceptionally well when the instinct turns out to be right. But can end companies if it isn’t.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#95

Post by rjsw »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #42
ksec wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which is weird.... It isn't weird at all. I would be surprised if it ever succeed in the first place. Cost was way too high. Intel not sharing the tech with others other than Micron. Micron wasn't committed to it either, and since unused capacity at the Fab was paid by Intel regardless they dont care. No long term solution or strategy to bring cost down. Neither Intel or Micron have a vision on this. No one wanted a…

I worked at Micron in the SSD division when Optane (originally called crosspoint “Xpoint”) was being made. In my mind, there was never a real serious push to productize it. But it’s not clear to me whether that was due to unattractive terms of the joint venture or lack of clear product fit. There was certainly a time when it seemed they were shopping for engineers opinions of what to do with it, but I think they quic…

A friend was working at Micron on a rackmount network server with a lot of flash memory, I didn't ask at the time what kind of flash it used. The project was cancelled when nearly finished.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#96

Post by wmf »

tayo42 wrote: post #45
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that would be my main complaint. Sticking optane in a dimm was just awkward as hell. You now have different bits of memory with very different characteristics, & you lose a ton of bandwidth. If CXL was around at the time it would have been such a nice fit, allowing for much lower latency access. It also seems like in spite of the bad fit, there were enough regular options drives, and they were indeed pr…

Can Linux differentiate that different dimms are different? Or does it see it all as one big memory space still?

Yes, Linux was aware of the difference via ACPI tables.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#97

Post by amluto »

ksec wrote: post #17
hbogert wrote: post #3

It stands out, because it didn't sell. Which is weird because there were some pretty big pros about using them. The latency for updating 1 byte was crazy good. Some databases or journals for something like zfs really benefited from this.

>Which is weird.... It isn't weird at all. I would be surprised if it ever succeed in the first place. Cost was way too high. Intel not sharing the tech with others other than Micron. Micron wasn't committed to it either, and since unused capacity at the Fab was paid by Intel regardless they dont care. No long term solution or strategy to bring cost down. Neither Intel or Micron have a vision on this. No one wanted a…

A ways back, I wrote a sort of database that was memory-mapped-file backed (a mistake, but I didn’t know that at the time), and I would have paid top dollar for even a few GB of NVDIMMs that could be put in an ordinary server and could be somewhat straightforwardly mounted as a DAX filesystem. I even tried to do some of the kernel work. But the hardware and firmware was such a mess that it was basically a lost cause. And none of the tech ever seemed to turn into an actual purchasable product. I’m a bit suspicious that Intel never found product-market fit in part because they never had a credible product on the NVDIMM side.

Somewhere I still have some actual battery-backed DIMMs (DRAM plus FPGA interposer plus awkward little supercapacitor bundle) in a drawer. They were not made by Intel, but Intel was clearly using them as a stepping stone toward the broader NVDIMM ecosystem. They worked on exactly one SuperMicro board, kind of, and not at all if you booted using UEFI. Rebooting without doing the magic handshake over SMBUS [0] first took something like 15 minutes, which was not good for those nines of availability.

[0] You can find my SMBUS host driver for exactly this purpose on the LKML archives. It was never merged, in part, because no one could ever get all the teams involved in the Xeon memory controller to reach any sort of agreement as to who owned the bus or how the OS was supposed to communicate without, say, defeating platform thermal management or causing the refresh interval to get out of sync with the DIMM temperature, thus causing corruption.

I’m suspicious that everything involved in Optane development was like this.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#98

Post by mort96 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #92
mort96 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be fine if I could put it in an M.2 slot. But all my computers already have RAM in their RAM slots, and even if I had a spare RAM slot, I don't know that I'd trust the software stack to treat one RAM slot as a drive... And their whole deal was making RAM persistent anyway, which isn't exactly what I want.

Optane M.2-format hardware exists.

Interesting, all I ever saw advertised was that weird persistent kinda slow RAM stick. Does the M.2 version just show up as a normal block device or is that too trying to be persistent RAM?

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#99

Post by olavgg »

hedora wrote: post #56
twotwotwo wrote: post #51

One potential application I briefly had hope for was really good power loss protection in front of a conventional Flash SSD. You only need a little compared to the overall SSD capacity to be able to correctly report the write was persisted, and it's always running, so there's less of a 'will PLP work when we really need it?' question. (Maybe there's some use as a read cache too? Host RAM's probably better for that, t…

Any decent SSD has capacitor (enterprise) or battery backed (phones) DRAM. Therefore, a sync write is just “copy the data to an I/O buffer over PCIe”. For databases, where you do lots of small scattered writes, and lots of small overwrites to the tail of the log, modern SSDs coalesce writes in that buffer, greatly reducing write wear, and allowing the effective write bandwidth to exceed the media write bandwidth. The…

I have tried multiple enterprise SSD's, for sync writes. Nothing comes close to Optane Dimm, even Optane NVMe is 10x slower than PDIMMS.

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/so-i-teste...

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#100

Post by mapt »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #27
ksec wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Which is weird.... It isn't weird at all. I would be surprised if it ever succeed in the first place. Cost was way too high. Intel not sharing the tech with others other than Micron. Micron wasn't committed to it either, and since unused capacity at the Fab was paid by Intel regardless they dont care. No long term solution or strategy to bring cost down. Neither Intel or Micron have a vision on this. No one wanted a…

Cost was fantastically cheap, if you take into account that Optane is going to live >>10x longer than a SSD. For a lot of bulk storage, yes, you don't have frequently changing data. But for databases or caches, that are under heavy load, optane was not only far faster, but if looking at life-cycle costs, way way less.

Write endurance of the drive would be measured in TBW, and TLC flash kept adding enough 3D layers to stay cheap enough, quickly enough, that Optane never really beat their pricing per TBW to make a practical product.

I have to wonder if it isn't usable for some kind of specialized AI workflow that would benefit from extremely low latency reads but which is isn't written often, at this point. Perhaps integrated in a GPU board.

Post reply on HN