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What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

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Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#41

Post by zozbot234 »

exmadscientist wrote: post #40

Around the time of Optane's discontinuation, the rumor mill was saying that the real reason it got the axe was that it couldn't be shrunk any, so its costs would never go down. Does anyone know if that's true? I never heard anything solid, but it made a lot of sense given what we know about Optane's fab process. And if no shrink was possible, is that because it was (a) possible but too hard; (b) known blocks to a die…

That's at least physically half-plausible, but it would be a terrible reason if true. 3.5 in. format hard drives can't be shrunk any, and their costs are correspondingly high, but they still sell - newer versions of NVMe even provide support for them. Same for LTO tape cartridges. Perhaps they expected other persistent-memory technologies to ultimately do better, but we haven't really seen this.

Worth noting though that Optane is also power-hungry for writes compared to NAND. Even when it was current, people noticed this. It's a blocker for many otherwise-plausible use cases, especially re: modern large-scale AI where power is a key consideration.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#42

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

ksec wrote: post #17
hbogert wrote: post #3

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.

>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…

I worked at Micron in the SSD division when Optane (originally called crosspoint “Xpoint”) was being made. In my mind, there was never a real serious push to productize it. But it’s not clear to me whether that was due to unattractive terms of the joint venture or lack of clear product fit.

There was certainly a time when it seemed they were shopping for engineers opinions of what to do with it, but I think they quickly determined it would be a much smaller market anyway from ssds and didn’t end up pushing on it too hard. I could be wrong though, it’s a big company and my corner was manufacturing and not product development.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#43

Post by hamdingers »

rkagerer wrote: post #32

My understanding is Optane is still unbeaten when it comes to latency. Has anyone examined its use as an OS volume, compared to today's leading SSD's? I know the throughput won't be as high, but in my experience that's not as important to how responsive your machine feels as latency.

> Has anyone examined its use as an OS volume, compared to today's leading SSD's?

Late last year I switched from a 1.5tb Optane 905P to a 4tb WD Blue SN5000 NVMe drive in a gaming machine and saw improved load times, which makes sense given the read and write speeds are ~double. No observable difference otherwise.

I'm sure that's not the use case you were looking for. I could probably tease out the difference in latency with benchmarks but that's not how I use the computer.

The 905P is now in service as an SSD cache for a large media server and that came with a big performance boost but the baseline I'm comparing to is just spinning drives.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#45

Post by tayo42 »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #26
zozbot234 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

Can Linux differentiate that different dimms are different? Or does it see it all as one big memory space still?

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#46

Post by amluto »

orion138 wrote: post #38
amluto wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 memory

Which “Optane memory”? The NVMe product always worked on non-Intel. The NVDIMM products that I played with only ever worked on a very small set of rather specialized Intel platforms. I bet AMD could have supported them about as easily as Intel, and Intel barely ever managed to support them.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#47

Post by zozbot234 »

rkagerer wrote: post #44

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.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#48

Post by gozzoo »

exmadscientist wrote: post #37
cogman10 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#49

Post by rkagerer »

hamdingers wrote: post #43
rkagerer wrote: post #32

My understanding is Optane is still unbeaten when it comes to latency. Has anyone examined its use as an OS volume, compared to today's leading SSD's? I know the throughput won't be as high, but in my experience that's not as important to how responsive your machine feels as latency.

> Has anyone examined its use as an OS volume, compared to today's leading SSD's? Late last year I switched from a 1.5tb Optane 905P to a 4tb WD Blue SN5000 NVMe drive in a gaming machine and saw improved load times, which makes sense given the read and write speeds are ~double. No observable difference otherwise. I'm sure that's not the use case you were looking for. I could probably tease out the difference in late…

Thanks, that's helpful real-world feedback (not that I wouldn't also be interested in some synthetic benchmark comparisons from someone else).

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#50

Post by wtallis »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #27
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…

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.

Optane was in the market during a time when the mainstream trend in the SSD industry was all about sacrificing endurance to get higher capacity. It's been several years, and I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever.

The niche that could actually make use of Optane's endurance was small and shrinking, and Intel had no roadmap to significantly improve Optane's $/GB which was unquestionably the technology's biggest weakness.

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