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What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

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Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#141

Post by wtallis »

amluto wrote: post #128
wtallis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> were those weird hybrid SSDs even implemented by actual hardware, or were they part of the giant series of massive kludges They were definitely part of the series of massive kludges. But aside from the Intel platforms they were marketed for, I never found a PCIe host that could see both of the NVMe devices on the drive. Some hosts would bring up the x2 link to the Optane half of the drive, some hosts would bring up…

Why on Earth did Intel implement this as a 2x2 device? They could have implemented multiple functions or they could have used a PCIe switch or they could have exposed their device as an NVMe device with multiple namespaces, etc. (I won’t swear that all of these would have worked nicely. But all of them would have performed better than arbitrarily splitting the link in half.) Maybe they didn’t own any of the IP for th…

The Optane side of the drive used the same x2 controller as the pure-Optane cache drives. The NAND side used a Silicon Motion controller, same as their consumer QLC drives of the era. They almost literally just crammed their two existing consumer products onto one PCB and shipped it. Intel was never interested enough in the consumer applications of Optane to design a good, useful SSD controller around it, and they weren't going to let a third-party like Silicon Motion make an Optane-compatible controller.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#142

Post by wtallis »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #135
wtallis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory The market thoroughly disagrees with your stupid exaggeration. QLC is a high-volume mainstream product. It's popular in low-end consumer SSDs, where the main problem is not endurance but sustained performance (especially writing to a mostly-full drive). A Windows PC is hardly a WORM workload.

Seems like it is though? Most consumer usage does not have much churn. For things like the browser cache that do churn the total volume isn't that high. The comparison here is database and caching workloads in the datacenter that experience high churn at an extremely high sustained volume. Many such workloads exist.

There's a very big difference between a workload where you have to take care to structure your IO to minimize writes so you don't burn out the drive, and a workload that is simply easy enough that you don't have to care about the write endurance because even the crappy drives will last for years.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#143

Post by fc417fc802 »

wtallis wrote: post #142
fc417fc802 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like it is though? Most consumer usage does not have much churn. For things like the browser cache that do churn the total volume isn't that high. The comparison here is database and caching workloads in the datacenter that experience high churn at an extremely high sustained volume. Many such workloads exist.

There's a very big difference between a workload where you have to take care to structure your IO to minimize writes so you don't burn out the drive, and a workload that is simply easy enough that you don't have to care about the write endurance because even the crappy drives will last for years.

Of course. The inferior but cheaper technology is more cost effective in most cases but for certain workloads that won't be the case despite being more affordable per unit upfront.

The workloads flash is more cost effective for (ie most of them) either aren't all that write heavy or alternatively leave the drive sitting idle the vast majority of the time. The typical consumer usecase is primarily reads while it mostly sits idle, with the relevant performance metrics largely determined by occasional bursts of activity.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#144

Post by Dylan16807 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #135
wtallis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory The market thoroughly disagrees with your stupid exaggeration. QLC is a high-volume mainstream product. It's popular in low-end consumer SSDs, where the main problem is not endurance but sustained performance (especially writing to a mostly-full drive). A Windows PC is hardly a WORM workload.

Seems like it is though? Most consumer usage does not have much churn. For things like the browser cache that do churn the total volume isn't that high. The comparison here is database and caching workloads in the datacenter that experience high churn at an extremely high sustained volume. Many such workloads exist.

Consumer usage does not have much churn, but the average desktop is probably doing 5-50 drive writes per year. That's far away from a heavy database load, but it's just as far away from WORM.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#145

Post by Synaesthesia »

ggm wrote: post #137

Did it ever have real input costs which justified its pricing or was it totally a synthetic price to cover an imagined value above base, and some IPR? I may be wrong, but I tend to think the fab cost has very little to do with the complexity, but not nothing, and the outcome cost is very unrelated to price at a viable yield. If optane failed, it was probably because Intel didn't like the economics of pricing it to su…

I still think it has a lot of potential, and is the logical next storage system, because of its performance advantages over NAND flash. Because input costs can come down.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#146

Post by Dylan16807 »

mapt wrote: post #129
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extra capacity of modern SSD is a good point, especially now that we have 100TB+ SSD. But Optane still offered 100 DWPD (drive writes per day), up to 3.2TB. Thats still just so many more DWPD than flash ssd. A Kioxia CM8V for example will do 12TB at 3 DWPD. The net TBW is still 10x apart. You can get back to high endurance with SLC drives like the Solidigm p7-p5810, but you're back down to 1.6TB and 50 DWPD, so,…

We don't care about (TBW/TB) at the consumer level, we care about (TBW/$), and 3D TLC was far, far cheaper per TB, so much so that TBW/$ was not a numerical advantage of Optane. That left ONLY the near-RAM-read-latency, which is only highly beneficial on specific workloads. Then they didn't invest in expanding killer app software that could utilize that latency, and didn't drop prices sufficiently to make it highly c…

In 2018, with Optane drives launching around $1.50/GB and TLC flash drives around $0.15/GB, it wasn't that much cheaper. As far as I'm aware Optane had a lot more than 10x the endurance.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#147

Post by Dylan16807 »

gozzoo wrote: post #48
exmadscientist wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS. It was also the best boot drive money could buy. Still is, I think, though other comments in the thread ask how it compares against today's best, which I'd also love to see.

This concept was very popular back in the days when computers used to boot from HDD, but now it doesn't make much sense. I wouldn't notice If my laptop boots for 5 sec instead of 10.

What concept was very popular in those days?

By my reckoning, there was zero overlap between the period of time where a reasonable computer configurer would pick a hard drive to boot from and the period of time where Optane was available.

And even for the general concept of a cache drive, I don't think I've ever seen it do well in the mainstream. Just a few niche roles, and some hybrid drives that sucked because they had small flash chips and only used them as a read cache, not a write cache.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#149

Post by simulator5g »

amluto wrote: post #97
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…

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.…

If you're thinking about reliability in terms of 9s you should probably not be depending on a single machine. Reboots could take hours and be fine if your architecture is set up for reliability.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#150

Post by simulator5g »

sombragris wrote: post #130

I think a factor in Optane's demise was dishonesty on the part of low-end laptop manufacturers. You were a poor student looking for an entry-level cheap laptop and saw a lot of models with 4GB [RAM] "memory" and suddenly there was this one model with "20 GB memory" for the same price. Seemed attractive to the regular guy, but this in fact was 4GB RAM + 16 GB Optane non-volatile storage (and maybe a paltry 32 GB SSD f…

I never bought one because I only saw Optane in these low spec configurations. I didn't see any use for a tiny SSD. I only learned more about it after it was discontinued.
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