This technology is actually developed by a company called Diablo Technologies. They seem to have licensed it to Samsung.
Do you mean SanDisk, or does Samsung also play into this somehow?
Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
21–30 of 205 posts
Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's something similar that we've had in the past. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive A bios patch is probably not necessary.
So if you don't install drivers it would act as a regular RAM? Thus ruining your performance.. I don't think it will work out of the box on regular systems. Also, isn't pcie better for this?
Maybe it helps if you have much data to process and don't need to move it from disk to RAM anymore. Everything can be done in RAM.
Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
#23'reliability rate of one unrecoverable error in 1017 (sic) bits read'
So about 4 unrecoverable errors per sector. Seems legit.
Do people not read their own copy?!
Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree! I wonder what will happen when memory and IO are essentially the same speed. Will we still need complex cache stores?
I doubt that will happen ever, there's always a tradeoff between cost, speed and space (on the die, ...), otherwise we'd all be running machines with 1TB L1 Cache.
Just because we've had to make tradeoffs so far does not mean these tradeoffs will always exist. Tradeoffs like these are not a natural law.
Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
#25Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
#26What OS support exists for this, and how does it work?
Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
#27I appreciate this might not be the right way to look at it, but from a trivia POV, in terms of raw performance, what era of regular memory would be comparable with it? (i.e. "typical desktop memory in 2004", say.)
According to this table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_latency its read latency of 150 µs is at least 15,000 times worse than 100 MHz "PC100" SDRAM, which is early 2000s-era.
Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
#28What OS support exists for this, and how does it work?
You need not just OS support but specific motherboard too.
Currently AFAIK this is only supported on SuperMicro dev kits.
Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
#29Is the advantage the low latency because the rest of the specifications seem to be pretty standard for an SSD. Does this require a BIOS patch of some sort?
The RAM slot helps for latency and throughput. SATA 3.0 would restricts this drive's read throughout from 880MB/s to less than 600MB/s, and would increase the write latency (5usec) by at least 1 or 2usec because of the typical CPU->southbridge->PCI express->SATA link it would go through, but here it is CPU->RAM slot. 1-2usec might sound negligible but it's not: it's 20-40% worse latency, so 20-40% fewer write IOPS.
SATA 3.2 (2000MB/s) would help for throughput but not for latency. It is also still quite uncommon even amongst latest generation servers, whereas this SSD is compatible with many current and older generation servers.
Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor
#30I can't wait to see the programming paradigm of memory vs permanent storage begin to blur in the next 5 or so years. It's going to make some major assumptions about how you program stuff change quite significantly and it's really exciting.
Traditional memory continues to become cheaper too. Flash is dimes a gigabyte, disk is cents a gig and videotape tenths of a cent per gigabyte. So supercomputers will always be maxing out each level of memory. And you will still need worry about memory hierarchies.
For ordinary computing, maybe a terabyte of flash will finally be enough.