111–120 of 164 posts
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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.
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Optane M.2-format hardware exists.
Iirc it wasn't great because higher power == more heat though
Did anyone ever see retention issues like this guy reported on one of his older models? https://goughlui.com/2024/07/28/tech-flashback-intel-optane-...
That's data retention issues on the very first read-through of the media after sitting in cold storage for many years, with subsequent performance returning to normal. It's definitely something to be aware of (and kudos to the blog poster for running that experiment) but worn-out NAND will behave a lot worse than that.
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That's data retention issues on the very first read-through of the media after sitting in cold storage for many years, with subsequent performance returning to normal. It's definitely something to be aware of (and kudos to the blog poster for running that experiment) but worn-out NAND will behave a lot worse than that.
Retention issues with completely new Optane is not great compared to SLC NAND, which Optane was supposed to beat. I have USB drives with the latter, probably a few dozen cycles at most, yet they have had no problems keeping data intact for over a decade.
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Retention issues with completely new Optane is not great compared to SLC NAND, which Optane was supposed to beat. I have USB drives with the latter, probably a few dozen cycles at most, yet they have had no problems keeping data intact for over a decade.
That's not completely new , it's just new old stock. That's the whole point of why the blogger ran that experiment.
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.
I never understood what they're meant to do. Intel seemed to picture some future where RAM is persistent; but they were never close to fast enough to replace RAM, and the option to reboot in order to fix some weird state your system has gotten itself into is a feature of computers, not a problem to work around.
So if you had mmap heavy read/write workloads… you could do some pretty cool stuff.
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Intel did a spectacularly poor job with the ecosystem around the memory cells. They made two plays, and both were flops. 1. “Optane” in DIMM form factor. This targeted (I think) two markets. First, use as slower but cheaper and higher density volatile RAM. There was actual demand — various caching workloads, for example, wanted hundreds of GB or even multiple TB in one server, and Optane was a route to get there. But…
One of the many problems was trying to limit the use of Optane to Intel devices. They should have manufactured and sold Optane memory and let other players build on top of it at a low level.
Optane died because Intel wanted to kill AMD and ARM with it. Killed Intel and a great technology along with it.
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It sounds like they didn't do a good job of putting the DIMM version in the hands of folks who'd write the drivers just for fun. The read path is sort of a wash, but writes are still unequalled. NAND writes feel like you're mailing a letter to the floating gate...
Isn't this addressed by newer PCIe standards? Of course, even the "new" Optane media reviewed in OP is stuck on PCIe 4.0...
There was a startup doing good work with similar storage chips that were pin (BGA) compatible with standard memory. Not sure what happened to them. That’d be easier to program than xpoint.
As for the new PCIe standard (you probably mean CXL), that’s also basically dead on arrival. The CPU is the power and money bottleneck for the applications it targets, so they provide a synchronous hardware API that stalls the processor pipeline when accessing high-latency devices.
Contrast this to NVMe, which can be set up to either never block the CPU or amortize multiple I/Os per cache miss.
Companies like NVIDIA are already able to maintain massive I/O concurrency over PCIe without CXL, because they have a programming model (the GPU) that supports it. CXL might be a small win for that.
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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...
Also, how was it guaranteeing the page writes were atomic?