> 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 performance benefit will be smaller and these configurations are not expected to be common or cost effective.
It doesn't sound that fast. Looks to be "slower" (throughput-wise) then modern NVMe drives (i.e. Evo 960 and obviously smaller) and clearly trying to bridge a price gap. Is the upside that it can act as an additional cache level without OS support? I remember the first time I used Intel Rapid Storage Tech (aka RST) ... it was also the last time as it's was convoluted with minimal (or no?) upside on Linux.
As an "enthusiast" I'm assuming that my Linux desktop with plenty of RAM + NVMe backed lvmcache will perform better.
I also assume that my laptop with reasonable RAM (because DDR (self)refresh sucks enough power to annoy me) + high performance NVMe drive also won't benefit.
> Keep in mind that consumer NVMe SSDs that boast throughput of 2GB/s or more generally do not reach their peak at low queue depth. Optane is supposed to be able to drive 1200MB/s read throughput at low queue depth (not sure why they listed QD4), so there is potential for some performance improvement here. Most consumer workloads never get out of low queue depth territory, so this could have some small real world benefit. Write throughput, however, is critically low.
> More importantly, these Optane drive are gear more towards lowering latency than transferring large files. Where HDDs access the data on the order of 10s of mS and SSDs access data on the order of 1mS (give or take), Optane should be able to access data on the order of 1s - 10s of uS. Where Optane will be useful is high numbers of small file accesses (DLLs, library files, etc.).
> That all said, I'd just as soon leave all the extra complications, compatibility issues, and inconsistencies on the table and get that 2 GB/s sdd that you mentioned until Intel figures out how to make these more compatible and easier to use without requiring a "golden setup". I don't want to buy a new W10, Kaby Lake, 200 series based system just to use one of these. My current W7/W10/Ubuntu, Skylake, 100 series system should work just fine for a good while yet.
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 to something that's barely better than NVMe in terms of performance and robustness seems far from initial claims too.
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.
> Intel's claim has been in the past that its density can exceed SSDs by a healthy margin
Seems doubtful they would reach that goal until SSDs hit some kind of hard plateau (kind of like HDDs did).
Toshiba plans to make a 100TB SSD over the next couple of years, and I believe Samsung has already announced a 16TB SSD. I doubt 3D Xpoint can catch-up with those in the given time frame.
It looks to be an accelerator cache for HDDs, but slower than an SSD, with fairly low capacity. And it requires a 7th gen intel processor, so this isn't a performance boost for older PCs either. Exactly who is this aimed at?
You lose SSD transfer speed, while gain _some_ hardware response latency.
NVMe response latency (on hardware side, not OS) is around 14-15micro-seconds on reads, and tops out at 200micro-seconds on writes [1]. Which is nearly 2-3 orders of magnitude below spinning rust. While Optane can halve this to 7micro-seconds on reads. The price/pref vs established NVMe tech is non-existent.
When I can spend $X/GB to get a 2000% performance bump, its hard to justify spending $X*4/GB to get 2050% performance bump. Most applications/data centers have yet to transfer to NVMe. Offering marginal gains a sizable markup is a risky strategy.
Furthermore Optane is nearly 2 orders of magnitude lower than RAM in latency, and 5 orders of magnitude lower transfer. So the idea of "non-volatile RAM" has yet to arrive.
---
Also "Transparent to the OS" should strike fear in your heart. The OS's job is to manage hardware, memory, and caches. Why drop this?
"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 performance data is forthcoming"
My interpretation is that it is a fancy cache using a new type of memory, XPoint, a non-volatile phase change memory, with greater endurance (and cost) than NAND sitting on the M.2 bus, combined with OS drivers to assist with the mapping.
The idea is M.2 speed > SATA, but the dynamic M.2 caching isn't native to the OS, so drivers are required to intermediate.
The only thing could get from Optane is QD1 performance. It is impressive (5x faster than current gen NVMe SSD). But everything else is just soso compared to NVMe SSD.
Quite a bit of marketing-speak here on the official site, without a lot of technical details.
I know the Optane SSD drives are fast -- is this just device-side driver software that allows you to virtually expand available "RAM" and mmap it to the SSD?
Why just i7 CPUs? Is there a hardware component?
"Just download and install the driver..." (Linux?)
These consumer Optane Memory drives rely on a chipset hardware feature (that was introduced in the last generation) to work with Intel's caching strategy for Windows, which is complicated and ugly partly because it has to work around Windows limitations and partly because it has to enforce their product segmentation strategy. On Linux, it's just a NVMe device that can be used with any pre-existing caching software solution.
On the enterprise side, Intel is offering the Memory Drive Technology software that is a minimal hypervisor to present a pool of memory equal to about DRAM+85% of Optane, with the actual allocation managed by the hypervisor and opaque to the guest OS. The hypervisor can run on several generations of Xeon processors.
Some of us have technical details, and put them out during the press event. The fact that Intel is staying high level is annoying, I admit, but they want "the community" to speak up, when you start using these drives.
I have tested on these devices, as a datastore for databases, and it has benefits. If you're writing a lot, and/or are very latency sensitive.
Seems like its some i3/i5/i7, only recent ones? Must be some hardware component to it that makes the SSD look like memory to the system, perhaps as another NUMA zone (could you have a huge NUMA zone with no CPU attached?)
What I understand of it, after skipping through all the marketing speak, is that the Optane Memory functions a cache for your SATA drive. The Optane cache is just a Optane SSD which uses some new and apparently faster 3D Nand technology.
And about Linux; somewhere in the PDF with the technical details it states the requirement that your OS has to be 64 bit Windows ..
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.
No DAX yet. Both this consumer Optane Memory product and the enterprise Optane SSD announced last week are standard NVMe devices. For the enterprise market, Intel is providing mmap capability with a hypervisor-based software solution.
it seems this would be a great use case for DAWs and sample libraries in general, many many small files to be accessed with extremely low latency: this could make it possible to run large orchestral templates fully purged at all times, which would be a great use case when your template has hundreds of GB of samples but you only use a few of them at a time.
This is already kind of doable with SSD, but if optane has an order of magnitude less access time it would of course make it even better for this use case.
They're a long way from realizing the full potential of the technology. Right now they're hugely limited by the interconnect. Also, if they reach some of the goals they've been talking about, it might need differently-designed operating systems to really work.
I think this is an Easy win for DIMM in servers where you could fit a much larger capacity then DRAM. And this is only a first gen product.
But for consumers? I am not sure if they can feel the difference between a decent SSD drive and Optane Memory.
It fits the role of Page File. So you could always have 2x - 3x the Optane Memory as Page Cache. System with this would means less Memory required, and saves battery. While the controller for SSD could be less complicated and focus primarily on Seq/Read Write. SSD could also be DRAM-less, save cost and battery.
But even then, $44 for 16GB is just hard to convince most consumers.
If I'm reading this right, this device is slower than a Samsung 960 Evo across the board (http://www.anandtech.com/show/10833/the-samsung-960-evo-1tb-...). It seems that when Intel started developing Optane, they didn't anticipate how much faster NVMe PCIe SSDs would become. Couple that with significant clock frequency headroom for DDR4, and this product really doesn't look competitive.
You're reading the wrong numbers. Try benchmarking with PostgreSQL's pg_test_fsync or with fio with the following options: --direct=1 --sync=1 --rw=write --bs=4k
Good random-write performance with 4k/8k blocks at QD1 is what matter for SSD's, not if they can write 2500MB/s to a volatile cache.
I think a lot of this next generation solid state storage level memory is going to wind up being ill suited for the dominant interconnect standards (e.g. DDR, SATA, or PCIe). I also really wonder if it isn't going to take a really long time for the relevant parts of the existing software stack to see serious development to effectively exploit this stuff.
Before the page could even finish rendering I had a pop-up to answer a survey. What is this called and why do websites continue to do it? Does this not massively destroy your conversion or retention rates? http://i.imgur.com/90VHYnU.png
So take a CPU with more memory channels on it, run at least 1 Optane per channel, run hundreds of VMs on it, everything runs from this slower RAM, but it is in memory and you only touch the SSDs for updating the disk. Once the cache is warmed up performance should be just fine.
Reaction to 2nd video: It is like a kitchen, and a panty, with a sous-chef which is like a conveyor belt. I mean if this runs ruby and also uses knife, how fast could this really be. ;)
If you've got suggestions for how to meaningfully and realistically compare caching of a Windows boot volume against a Linux cache solution, please share. My usual suite of tests won't work well for this, and I'm open to suggestions for what to include in my new test suite.
[+] [-] 2bluesc|9 years ago|reply
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 performance benefit will be smaller and these configurations are not expected to be common or cost effective.
It doesn't sound that fast. Looks to be "slower" (throughput-wise) then modern NVMe drives (i.e. Evo 960 and obviously smaller) and clearly trying to bridge a price gap. Is the upside that it can act as an additional cache level without OS support? I remember the first time I used Intel Rapid Storage Tech (aka RST) ... it was also the last time as it's was convoluted with minimal (or no?) upside on Linux.
As an "enthusiast" I'm assuming that my Linux desktop with plenty of RAM + NVMe backed lvmcache will perform better.
I also assume that my laptop with reasonable RAM (because DDR (self)refresh sucks enough power to annoy me) + high performance NVMe drive also won't benefit.
Is this just marketing fluff?
[+] [-] 2bluesc|9 years ago|reply
> Keep in mind that consumer NVMe SSDs that boast throughput of 2GB/s or more generally do not reach their peak at low queue depth. Optane is supposed to be able to drive 1200MB/s read throughput at low queue depth (not sure why they listed QD4), so there is potential for some performance improvement here. Most consumer workloads never get out of low queue depth territory, so this could have some small real world benefit. Write throughput, however, is critically low.
> More importantly, these Optane drive are gear more towards lowering latency than transferring large files. Where HDDs access the data on the order of 10s of mS and SSDs access data on the order of 1mS (give or take), Optane should be able to access data on the order of 1s - 10s of uS. Where Optane will be useful is high numbers of small file accesses (DLLs, library files, etc.).
> That all said, I'd just as soon leave all the extra complications, compatibility issues, and inconsistencies on the table and get that 2 GB/s sdd that you mentioned until Intel figures out how to make these more compatible and easier to use without requiring a "golden setup". I don't want to buy a new W10, Kaby Lake, 200 series based system just to use one of these. My current W7/W10/Ubuntu, Skylake, 100 series system should work just fine for a good while yet.
[0] http://www.anandtech.com/comments/11227/intel-launches-optan...
[+] [-] slizard|9 years ago|reply
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 to something that's barely better than NVMe in terms of performance and robustness seems far from initial claims too.
[1] https://semiaccurate.com/2017/03/10/intel-mislead-press-xpoi...
[+] [-] nilanjonB|9 years ago|reply
If the gains aren't that significant, why would people buy it and why would PC maker want to use it?
[+] [-] Drdrdrq|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] searchfaster|9 years ago|reply
Also if you are already mmap'ing some big file which needs frequent access, I do not see how this will help ?
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] mtgx|9 years ago|reply
Seems doubtful they would reach that goal until SSDs hit some kind of hard plateau (kind of like HDDs did).
Toshiba plans to make a 100TB SSD over the next couple of years, and I believe Samsung has already announced a 16TB SSD. I doubt 3D Xpoint can catch-up with those in the given time frame.
[+] [-] freeone3000|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valarauca1|9 years ago|reply
You lose SSD transfer speed, while gain _some_ hardware response latency.
NVMe response latency (on hardware side, not OS) is around 14-15micro-seconds on reads, and tops out at 200micro-seconds on writes [1]. Which is nearly 2-3 orders of magnitude below spinning rust. While Optane can halve this to 7micro-seconds on reads. The price/pref vs established NVMe tech is non-existent.
When I can spend $X/GB to get a 2000% performance bump, its hard to justify spending $X*4/GB to get 2050% performance bump. Most applications/data centers have yet to transfer to NVMe. Offering marginal gains a sizable markup is a risky strategy.
Furthermore Optane is nearly 2 orders of magnitude lower than RAM in latency, and 5 orders of magnitude lower transfer. So the idea of "non-volatile RAM" has yet to arrive.
---
Also "Transparent to the OS" should strike fear in your heart. The OS's job is to manage hardware, memory, and caches. Why drop this?
[1] https://www.cs.utah.edu/~manua/pubs/systor15.pdf
[+] [-] temuze|9 years ago|reply
"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 performance data is forthcoming"
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tech...
[+] [-] bbulkow|9 years ago|reply
2. In the NVMe form factor, it supports older CPUs.
3. In the DIMM form factor, it will be far, far faster than NVMe, but intel isn't saying when those are coming.
[+] [-] 1001101|9 years ago|reply
The idea is M.2 speed > SATA, but the dynamic M.2 caching isn't native to the OS, so drivers are required to intermediate.
Pretty underwhelming relative to the hype.
[+] [-] jpalomaki|9 years ago|reply
Maybe this makes sense if you need lots of space. Over 1TB SSDs are expensive.
[+] [-] hl5|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dguaraglia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codebook|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smlacy|9 years ago|reply
I know the Optane SSD drives are fast -- is this just device-side driver software that allows you to virtually expand available "RAM" and mmap it to the SSD?
Why just i7 CPUs? Is there a hardware component?
"Just download and install the driver..." (Linux?)
[+] [-] wtallis|9 years ago|reply
On the enterprise side, Intel is offering the Memory Drive Technology software that is a minimal hypervisor to present a pool of memory equal to about DRAM+85% of Optane, with the actual allocation managed by the hypervisor and opaque to the guest OS. The hypervisor can run on several generations of Xeon processors.
[+] [-] bbulkow|9 years ago|reply
I have tested on these devices, as a datastore for databases, and it has benefits. If you're writing a lot, and/or are very latency sensitive.
[+] [-] AdamJacobMuller|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] misja111|9 years ago|reply
And about Linux; somewhere in the PDF with the technical details it states the requirement that your OS has to be 64 bit Windows ..
[+] [-] Andys|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amluto|9 years ago|reply
I'll believe it when I see the spec and the code.
[+] [-] wtallis|9 years ago|reply
3D XPoint DIMMs are on the roadmap for next year.
[+] [-] wmf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tetraodonpuffer|9 years ago|reply
This is already kind of doable with SSD, but if optane has an order of magnitude less access time it would of course make it even better for this use case.
[+] [-] bushin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] readams|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eightysixfour|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewmcwatters|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksec|9 years ago|reply
But for consumers? I am not sure if they can feel the difference between a decent SSD drive and Optane Memory. It fits the role of Page File. So you could always have 2x - 3x the Optane Memory as Page Cache. System with this would means less Memory required, and saves battery. While the controller for SSD could be less complicated and focus primarily on Seq/Read Write. SSD could also be DRAM-less, save cost and battery.
But even then, $44 for 16GB is just hard to convince most consumers.
[+] [-] ak217|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olavgg|9 years ago|reply
Good random-write performance with 4k/8k blocks at QD1 is what matter for SSD's, not if they can write 2500MB/s to a volatile cache.
Recommended read http://www.sebastien-han.fr/blog/2014/10/10/ceph-how-to-test...
[+] [-] Quequau|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whalesalad|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickg_zill|9 years ago|reply
So take a CPU with more memory channels on it, run at least 1 Optane per channel, run hundreds of VMs on it, everything runs from this slower RAM, but it is in memory and you only touch the SSDs for updating the disk. Once the cache is warmed up performance should be just fine.
[+] [-] runeks|9 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.intel.com/buy/us/en/audience/optane-memory
[+] [-] wickedlogic|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] replete|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostmsu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtallis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tkyjonathan|9 years ago|reply