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What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

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Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#51

Post by twotwotwo »

One potential application I briefly had hope for was really good power loss protection in front of a conventional Flash SSD. You only need a little compared to the overall SSD capacity to be able to correctly report the write was persisted, and it's always running, so there's less of a 'will PLP work when we really need it?' question. (Maybe there's some use as a read cache too? Host RAM's probably better for that, though.) It's going to be rewritten lots of times, but it's supposed to be ready for that.

It seems like there's a very small window, commercially, for new persistent memories. Flash throughput scales really cost-efficiently, and a lot is already built around dealing with the tens-of-microseconds latencies (or worse--networked block storage!). Read latencies you can cache your way out of, and writers can either accept commit latency or play it a little fast and loose (count a replicated write as safe enough or...just not be safe). You have to improve on Flash by enough to make it worth the leap while remaining cheaper than other approaches to the same problem, and you have to be confident enough in pulling it off to invest a ton up front. Not easy!

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#52

Post by zozbot234 »

twotwotwo wrote: post #51

One potential application I briefly had hope for was really good power loss protection in front of a conventional Flash SSD. You only need a little compared to the overall SSD capacity to be able to correctly report the write was persisted, and it's always running, so there's less of a 'will PLP work when we really need it?' question. (Maybe there's some use as a read cache too? Host RAM's probably better for that, t…

> It seems like there's a very small window, commercially, for new persistent memories. Flash throughput scales really cost-efficiently

Flash is no bueno for write-heavy workloads, and the random-access R/W performance is meh compared to Optane. MLC and SLC have better durability and performance, but still very mid.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#53

Post by wtallis »

amluto wrote: post #46
orion138 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The consumer "Optane memory" products were a combination of NVMe and Intel's proprietary caching software, the latter of which was locked to Intel's platforms. They also did two generations of hybrid Optane+QLC drives that only worked on certain Intel platforms, because they ran a PCIe x2+x2 pair of links over a slot normally used for a single X2 or x4 link.

Yes, the pure-Optane consumer "Optane memory" products were at a hardware level just small, fast NVMe drives that could be use anywhere, but they were never marketed that way.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#54

Post by aaronmdjones »

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.

I have a 16 GiB Optane NVMe M.2 drive in my router as a boot drive, running OpenWRT.

It's so incredibly fast and responsive that the LuCI interface completely loads the moment I hit enter on the login form.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#55

Post by wtallis »

zozbot234 wrote: post #41
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 t…

> 3.5 in. format hard drives can't be shrunk any,

You're looking at the entirely wrong kind of shrinking. Hard drives are still (gradually) improving storage density: the physical size of a byte on a platter does go down over time.

Optane's memory cells had little or no room for shrinking, and Optane lacked 3D NAND's ability to add more layers with only a small cost increase.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#56

Post by hedora »

twotwotwo wrote: post #51

One potential application I briefly had hope for was really good power loss protection in front of a conventional Flash SSD. You only need a little compared to the overall SSD capacity to be able to correctly report the write was persisted, and it's always running, so there's less of a 'will PLP work when we really need it?' question. (Maybe there's some use as a read cache too? Host RAM's probably better for that, t…

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.

These schemes are much less expensive than optane.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#57

Post by chrneu »

deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #42
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…

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 quic…

I worked at Intel for a while and might be able to explain this.

There were/are often projects that come down from management that nobody thinks are worth pursuing. When i say nobody, it might not just be engineers but even say 1 or 2 people in management who just do a shit roll out. There are a lot of layers of Intel and if even one layer in the Intel Sandwich drag their feet it can kill an entire project. I saw it happen a few times in my time there. That one specific node that intel dropped the ball on kind of came back to 2-3 people in one specific department, as an example.

Optane was a minute before I got there, but having been excited about it at the time and somewhat following it, that's the vibe I get from Optane. It had a lot of potential but someone screwed it up and it killed the momentum.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#58

Post by wtallis »

twotwotwo wrote: post #51

One potential application I briefly had hope for was really good power loss protection in front of a conventional Flash SSD. You only need a little compared to the overall SSD capacity to be able to correctly report the write was persisted, and it's always running, so there's less of a 'will PLP work when we really need it?' question. (Maybe there's some use as a read cache too? Host RAM's probably better for that, t…

> One potential application I briefly had hope for was really good power loss protection in front of a conventional Flash SSD.

That was never going to work out. Adding an entirely new kind of memory to your storage stack was never going to be easier or cheaper than adding a few large capacitors to the drive so it could save the contents of the DRAM that the SSD still needed whether or not there was Optane in the picture.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#59

Post by amluto »

wtallis wrote: post #53
amluto wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The consumer "Optane memory" products were a combination of NVMe and Intel's proprietary caching software, the latter of which was locked to Intel's platforms. They also did two generations of hybrid Optane+QLC drives that only worked on certain Intel platforms, because they ran a PCIe x2+x2 pair of links over a slot normally used for a single X2 or x4 link. Yes, the pure-Optane consumer "Optane memory" products were…

I feel like this is proving my point. You can’t read “Optane” and have any real idea of what you’re buying.

Also… were those weird hybrid SSDs even implemented by actual hardware, or were they part of the giant series of massive kludges in the “Rapid Storage” family where some secret sauce in the PCIe host lied to the OS about what was actually connected so an Intel driver could replace the OS’s native storage driver (NVMe, AHCI, or perhaps something worse depending on generation) to implement all the actual logic in software?

It didn’t help Intel that some major storage companies started selling very, very nice flash SSDs in the mean time.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#60

Post by amluto »

epistasis wrote: post #10
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.

When most people are running databases on AWS RDS, or on ridiculous EBS drives with insanely low throughput and latency, it makes sense to me. There are very few applications that benefit from such low latency, and if one has to go off the standard path of easy, but slow and expensive and automatically backup up, people will pick the ease. Having the best technology performance is not enough to have product market fi…

> There are very few applications that benefit from such low latency

Basically any RDBMS? MySQL and Postgres both benefit from high performance storage, but too many customers have moved into the cloud where you can’t get NVMe-like performance for durable storage for anything remotely close to a worthwhile price.

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