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Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

intel.com

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Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#51

Post by slizard »

petra wrote: post #41
slizard wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partly it is just marketing fluff, Intel trying to save their face and hoping that most will not remember the promises of revolutionary product while what they released is barely evolutionary. Can't find a better article right now than this SEmiaccurate rant [1] which is quite inflammatory, but does not push falsehoods AFAICT. But Intel has essentially walked back from the 100-1000x improvements it initially claimed…

I understand why Intel claimed 100-1000x improvement: it's great for the stock. But what happens now if it's not true, will the stock loose all that gain ? or some of that gain will stay ? And is it legal ?

I don't think there's anything illegal in ove-promising and severely under-delivering. Also, given the long delay of the 1st gen product release Intel's massive PR and marketing machinery had plenty of time to rewire many if not most people's expectations. Doesn't have the endurance and the orders of magnitude performance advantage promised? Just focus QD1 performance, feed 3-5-10x instead to the media for long enough, over-provision to be able to deliver an OK consumer product and keep everyone's hopes up that revolution will come "soon".

People have short memory (even tech journalists), especially when there is not enough competition.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#53

Post by ChuckMcM »

The 'win' in theory for this stuff is that it is much faster than SSDs at low queue depths and it is significantly more write tolerant.

An interesting interesting system design might be a 2GB main memory with a 32GB swap partition on this device. That would be interesting because in idle mode it uses less power than an equivalent amount of DDR memory. So you could potentially build a laptop with good performance on larger memory tasks but longer standby battery life. It would also be interesting paired with an equivalent amount of DRAM where it mirrors main memory so you could have 'instant' off and 'instant' on type booting and shutdown.

At larger pool sizes this becomes interesting as a non-volatile index for NoSQL and other databases. Intel's claim has been in the past that its density can exceed SSDs by a healthy margin.Not seeing that in these products but time will tell.

I've been watching them struggle to productize this tech for about 2 years now[1]. Now to see if they can get it to live up to the hype.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/intel-and-micron-unv...

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#54

Post by Joeri »

slizard wrote: post #33
2bluesc wrote: post #16

Anandtech, as usual, has a good article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11227/intel-launches-optane-me... > The Optane Memory products are squeezing into a relatively small niche for limited budgets that require a lot of storage and want the benefit of solid state performance without paying the full price of a boot SSD. Intel notes that Optane Memory caching can be used in front of hybrid drives and SATA SSDs, but the…

Partly it is just marketing fluff, Intel trying to save their face and hoping that most will not remember the promises of revolutionary product while what they released is barely evolutionary. Can't find a better article right now than this SEmiaccurate rant [1] which is quite inflammatory, but does not push falsehoods AFAICT. But Intel has essentially walked back from the 100-1000x improvements it initially claimed…

You have to remember thus is a first gen product. Early ssd's were abysmal.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#56

Post by baq »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #15
eightysixfour wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it will be a bit different once they start selling DIMMs. I'm looking forward to seeing how that works out.

It seems like that could be pretty useful in a laptop, if your RAM was nonvolatile, wake from sleep would be truly instantaneous, you'd think (and it would survive your battery dying).

you still need to reinitialize devices; only RAM survives. it'd be no faster than current wake from suspend, but it'd be hibernation.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#57

Post by amluto »

I think you can (pending driver support?) plug one of these in and memory map it. On Linux, this means you'd see it as a "DAX" filesystem, and if you mmap(2) a file, you get a bona fide direct mapping of the hardware into your address space. This is very cool and would enable some interesting database-ish use cases.

I'll believe it when I see the spec and the code.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#58

Post by dragontamer »

nilanjonB wrote: post #43
2bluesc wrote: post #16

Anandtech, as usual, has a good article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11227/intel-launches-optane-me... > The Optane Memory products are squeezing into a relatively small niche for limited budgets that require a lot of storage and want the benefit of solid state performance without paying the full price of a boot SSD. Intel notes that Optane Memory caching can be used in front of hybrid drives and SATA SSDs, but the…

I'm wondering what market their actually aiming for? non-NVMe drive users? If the gains aren't that significant, why would people buy it and why would PC maker want to use it?

Its pretty crap for the consumer market. Your typical MLC SSD (or even TLC SSD) over SATA is more than sufficient for the consumer market, at prices that actually will be used (although even a TLC SSD seems to be considered "high end" by my family members...)

---------

The Optane memory seems to have a niche in replacing DRAM servers. So instead of running Redis, MySQL, or Postgres on DRAM, you can run it on Optane instead.

Optane is cheaper than DDR4 but almost as fast (latency wise). Latency is a big deal when it comes to database and/or key-value pair workloads.

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#59

Post by fgonzag »

timothycrosley wrote: post #31
temuze wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks faster than an SSD to me. From the FAQ: "Q4: Will Intel Optane memory also accelerate an SSD? If so how much? A: Yes. Intel Optane memory can be used to accelerate any type of SATA-based storage media, including SATA SSDs, However, the performance benefit of adding Intel Optane memory will be greater on slower storage devices like an HDD versus a relatively faster storage device like a SATA-SSD. Additional perf…

It's faster than SATA SSD but slower than most NVMe M.2 SSDs: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11227/intel-launches-optane-me... . Because of when this was launched, and the fact it only works with newer processors that also support NVMe, by the time it is at all common place, so would M.2 SSDs, making it a weird concept. It's essentially the most expensive per GB NVMe drive, with worse performance, and some software to…

Except for the fact that it hits max throughput at way lower queue depths, is bit addressable, and it destroys mixed workloads since you can read while writing. I don't think it'll be revolutionary, but it will be quite nice for caching, databases, or even as a write cache using something like ZFS's zil, then flushing to NVMe SSDs

Re: Optane Memory – A bridge between DRAM and storage

#60

Post by wallacoloo »

probablybanned wrote: post #39

Does anyone know whether this memory has limited cycle life like Flash?

It does. Somebody else linked to the Semiaccurate article higher in the comments where they discuss this. It looks as though the per-bit endurance of the Optane drive is a bit less than modern flash, but they counteract this by having the drive's firmware reserve some blocks that it can remap over failing blocks.
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