I’m still sad they discontinued them. What’s the alternative now does anything come close?
Small sizes are on secondary market for ~$1/GB.
What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
71–80 of 164 posts
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#72Around 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…
I think it was killed primarily because the DIMM version had a terrible programming API. There was no way to pin a cache line, update it and flush, so no existing database buffer pool algorithms were compatible with it. Some academic work tried to address this, but I don’t know of any products. The SSD form factor wasn’t any faster at writes than NAND + capacitor-backed power loss protection. The read path was faster…
The DIMMs were their own shitshow and I don't know how they even made it as far as they did.
The SSDs were never going to be dominant at straight read or write workloads, but they were absolutely king of the hill at mixed workloads because, as you note, time to first byte was so low that they switched between read and write faster than anything short of DRAM. This was really, really useful for a lot of workloads, but benchmarkers rarely bothered to look at this corner... despite it being, say, the exact workload of an OS boot drive.
For years there was nothing that could touch them in that corner (OS drive, swap drive, etc) and to this day it's unclear if the best modern drives still can or can't compete.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm saying that there are very few downstream applications that use databases that benefit from reducing latency beyond the slow performance of the cloud. Running your database on VMs or baremetal gives better performance, but almost no applications built on databases bother to do it.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#74My 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…
Unfortunately a gaming machine workload is so read-heavy that I wouldn't expect Optane to square up well. Gaming is all about read speed and overall capacity. You need that heavy I/O mix, especially with low latency deadlines, to see gains from Optane. That limited target use case, coupled with ignorant benchmarking, always limited them.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#75Related: "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.
I’ve been considering buying 8x64g models and setting them as equal priority swap disks (to mitigate the low throughput) for this exact reason.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#76Now do Intel's HBM/CPU Max
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#77I’m still sad they discontinued them. What’s the alternative now does anything come close?
Small sizes are on secondary market for ~$1/GB.
Which is a bargain compared to what DRAM costs today. If you just include the bare minimum of DRAM for a successful boot and immediately set up the entire "small" Optane drive as swap, that's a viable workstation-class system for comparative peanuts. You can't do this with NAND because the write workload of swap kills the media (I suppose it becomes viable if you monitor SMART wearout indicators and heavily overprovision the storage to leverage the drive's pSLC mode, but you're still treating $~0.10/GB hardware as a consumable and that will cost you) and of course you can't do it with spinning rust because the media is too slow.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#78Around 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…
Flash has the same shrink problem. And the solution for Optane was the same: go 3D
I don't think the shrink problem is at all the same for the two technologies. There are some really weird materials and production steps in Optane that are simply not present when making Flash cells.
Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is actually insane. Do you mean 2-4 people in one department basically killed Intel? Roll to disbelief.