Maybe we can also mention the HP Memristor here.
What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
21–30 of 164 posts
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#22These are absolute beasts for database servers, and definitely needs to make a comeback.
They suck for large sequential file access, but incredible for small random access: databases.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#23I’m still sad they discontinued them. What’s the alternative now does anything come close?
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#24Related: "High-bandwidth flash progress and future" (15 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46700384 In an era of RAM shortages and quarterly price increases, Optane remains viable for swap and CPU/GPU cache.
in an era of shortages, if there was an optane factory today ready to print money...
Secondary market surplus pricing (~$1/GB) value accrues to the buyer..
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#25Optane was crazy good tech, it way just too expensive at the time for mass adoption, but the benefits were so good. Looking at those charts, besides the DWPD it feels like normal NVMe has mostly caught up. I occassionally wonder where a gen 7/8(?) optane would be today if it caught on, it'd probably be nuts.
> besides the DWPD it feels like normal NVMe has mostly caught up.
So what you mean is that on the most important metric of them all for many workloads, Flash-based NVMe has not caught up at all. When you run a write heavy workload on storage with a limited DWPD (including heavy swapping from RAM) higher performance actually hurts your durability.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#26It 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.
Optane didn't sell because they focused on their weird persistent DIMM sticks, which are a nightmare for enterprise where for many ordinary purposes you want ephemeral data that disappears as soon as you cut power. Thet should have focused on making ordinary storage and solving the interconnect bandwidth and latency problems differently, such as with more up-to-date PCIe standards.
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 pretty incredible. Good endurance, reasonable price (and cheap as dirt if you consider that endurance/lifecycle cost!), some just fantastic performance figures. My conclusion is that alas there just aren't many people in the world who are serious about storage performance.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#27It 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…
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.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
in an era of shortages, if there was an optane factory today ready to print money...
Secondary market surplus pricing (~$1/GB) value accrues to the buyer..
> (~$1/GB)
Isn't that actually crazy good, even insane value for the performance and DWPD you get with Optane, especially with DRAM being ~$15/GB or so? I don't think ~$1/GB NAND is anywhere that good on durability, even if the raw performance is quite possibly higher.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#29It 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.
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 still faster than the best SSDs) but SSDs remain good enough and fast enough while being a lot cheaper.
The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#30It 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.
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 the machines and DIMMs never really became available. Then there was the idea of using Optane DIMMs as persistent storage. This was always tricky because the DDR interface wasn’t meant for this, and Intel also seems to have a lot of legacy tech in the way (their caching system and memory controller) and, for whatever reason, they seem to be barely capable of improving their own technology. They had multiple serious false starts in the space (a power-supply-early-warning scheme using NMI or MCE to idle the system, a horrible platform-specific register to poke to ask the memory controller to kindly flush itself, and the stillborn PCOMMIT instruction).
2. Very nice NVMe devices. I think this was more of a failure of marketing. If they had marketed a line of SSDs that, coupled with an appropriate filesystem, could give 99% fsync latency of 5 microseconds and they had marketed this, I bet people would have paid. But they did nothing of the sort — instead they just threw around the term “Optane” inconsistently.
These days one could build a PCM-backed CXL-connected memory mapped drive, and the performance might be awesome. Heck, I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to get a GPU to stream weights directly off such a device at NVLink-like speeds. Maybe Intel should try it.