Perhaps this would be a good application for 3D XPoint memory that was seemingly discontinued due to lack of a compelling use case.
It was discontinued because it was too expensive to be viable.
GPUs can now use PCIe-attached memory or SSDs to boost VRAM capacity
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Re: GPUs can now use PCIe-attached memory or SSDs to boost VRAM capacity
#12Perhaps this would be a good application for 3D XPoint memory that was seemingly discontinued due to lack of a compelling use case.
It was discontinued because it was too expensive to be viable.
Usually cost comes down with volume so that is also tied to lack of uses. If a significant use case was known it could have been scaled to offset investments. Things were already developed for SSD and memory access tiers with no substantial demand/application for something in-between.
Re: GPUs can now use PCIe-attached memory or SSDs to boost VRAM capacity
#13Good job decreasing latency. Now work on the bandwidth. A single HBM3 module has the bandwidth of half-a-dozen data center grade PCIe 5.0 x16 NVME drives. A single DDR5 DIMM has the bandwidth of a pair of PCIe 5.0 x4 NVME drives.
"New RISC-V microprocessor can run CPU, GPU, and NPU workloads simultaneously" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39938538
Re: GPUs can now use PCIe-attached memory or SSDs to boost VRAM capacity
#14Perhaps this would be a good application for 3D XPoint memory that was seemingly discontinued due to lack of a compelling use case.
I'll just leave this here:
https://computeexpresslink.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/CX...
Combined with the fact that Intel created both CXL and Optane, it stands to reason that the plan was to combine them eventually. Unfortunately, that was never came to pass :(
Re: GPUs can now use PCIe-attached memory or SSDs to boost VRAM capacity
#15Perhaps this would be a good application for 3D XPoint memory that was seemingly discontinued due to lack of a compelling use case.
Optane definitely had many great uses. It had stunningly good iops with very low latency, it had fantastic endurance, and no write amplification concerns. Optane was excellent for datases, just pricey! Far more pricey than Intel had promised initially, which was a disappointment, but still somewhat in league with enterprise SSDs of the time. If you really wanted very low latency you needed Optane DIMMs. And that was…
Every time I go through old NVME/m2 drives in the bins in our IT cage, I sigh and think what could have been.
Re: GPUs can now use PCIe-attached memory or SSDs to boost VRAM capacity
#16Perhaps this would be a good application for 3D XPoint memory that was seemingly discontinued due to lack of a compelling use case.
Optane definitely had many great uses. It had stunningly good iops with very low latency, it had fantastic endurance, and no write amplification concerns. Optane was excellent for datases, just pricey! Far more pricey than Intel had promised initially, which was a disappointment, but still somewhat in league with enterprise SSDs of the time. If you really wanted very low latency you needed Optane DIMMs. And that was…
Optane was co-owned by a flash memory manufacturer. Maybe an SSD with very long longevity didnt fit their plans.
Its may be enough that just another company would have managed to create/license something like Optane and both companies would have stuck with a large over capacity for a long time.
Re: GPUs can now use PCIe-attached memory or SSDs to boost VRAM capacity
#17Perhaps this would be a good application for 3D XPoint memory that was seemingly discontinued due to lack of a compelling use case.
Optane definitely had many great uses. It had stunningly good iops with very low latency, it had fantastic endurance, and no write amplification concerns. Optane was excellent for datases, just pricey! Far more pricey than Intel had promised initially, which was a disappointment, but still somewhat in league with enterprise SSDs of the time. If you really wanted very low latency you needed Optane DIMMs. And that was…
>And it made it complex to figure out how to use those DIMMs, those parts of memory that would be slower but persistent. Using the DIMMs was hard.
CXL changes the game due to its cache coherency protocol. You don't have to care, precisely because the system transparently deals with this directly in the hardware. It is just one giant address space. You don't need slow OS level page faults or to update the page table every time something is loaded or unloaded from memory.
The biggest problem with persistent memory is building an application with transactional semantics. All the hardware and software transactional memory is built around concurrency and not persistence. When you think about it, that is kind of backwards. Persistent memory has very loose performance requirements since I/O is assumed to be slow. Meanwhile parallelism and concurrency are about increasing performance and therefore it defeats the point if it ends up slower than without.