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What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

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Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#81

Post by aggieNick02 »

rkagerer wrote: post #49
hamdingers wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

We benchmarked three of the popular Optane NVMe SSDs about three years ago. There was a short window when they were on clearance and a popular choice as a cache SSD in TrueNAS.

https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/425127-benchmarking-op...

You can compare their benchmarks with the other almost 400 SSDs we've benchmarked. Most impressive is that three years later they are still the top random read QD1 performers, with no traditional flash SSD coming anywhere close:

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/benchm...

They are amazing for how consistent and boring their performance is. Bit level access means no need for TRIM or garbage collection, performance doesn't degrade over time, latency is great, and random IO is not problematic.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#82

Post by wtallis »

empiricus wrote: post #80
chrneu wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's somewhat plausible that a small group of people in one department were responsible for the bad bets that made their 10nm process a failure. But it was very much a group effort for Intel to escalate that problem into the prolonged disaster. Management should have stopped believing the undeliverable promises coming out of their fab side after a year or two, and should have started much sooner to design chips targeting fab processes that actually worked.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#83

Post by lvl155 »

exmadscientist wrote: post #39
dangoodmanUT wrote: post #20

Optane 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.

The actual strength of Optane was on mixed workloads. It's hard to write a flash cell (read-erase-write cycle, higher program voltage, settling time, et cetera). Optane didn't have any of that baggage. This showed up as amazing numbers on a 50%-read, 50%-write mix. Which, guess what, a lot of real workloads have, but benchmarks don't often cover well. This is why it's a great OS boot drive: there's so much cruddy log…

It’s the best OS drive especially p5800x.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#84

Post by thesz »

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.

In "databases and journals" you rarely update just one byte, you do a transaction that updates data, several indexes and metadata. All of that needs to be atomic.

Power failure can happen in between any of "1 byte updates with crazy latencies." However small latency is, power failure is still faster. Usually, there is a write ahead or some other log that alleviates the problem, this log is usually written in streaming fashion.

What is good, though, is that "blast radius" [1] of failure is smaller than usual - failed one byte write rarely corrupts more that one byte or cache line. SQLite has to deal with 512 (and even more) bytes long possible corruptions on most disks, with Optane it is not necessarily so. So, less data to copy, scan, etc.

[1] https://sqlite.org/psow.html

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#86

Post by hrmtst93837 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #14
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.

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.

[flagged]

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#87

Post by [deleted] »

wtallis wrote: post #58
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 pict…

[deleted]

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#88

Post by mort96 »

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.

I never understood what they're meant to do. Intel seemed to picture some future where RAM is persistent; but they were never close to fast enough to replace RAM, and the option to reboot in order to fix some weird state your system has gotten itself into is a feature of computers, not a problem to work around.

Re: What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)

#90

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

Weryj wrote: post #75
walterbell wrote: post #5

Related: "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.

Can confirm doing so is awesome. Get some slightly bigger ones and partition them for additional use as zil. They're extremely satisfying to use, and depressing to remember that we'll never see their like again.
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