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[Announced] Optane SSD: you can also use as RAM
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[Announced] Optane SSD: you can also use as RAM

sayem314sayem314 Member
edited March 2017 in General

Intel announced today the first Optane-branded product using its new 3D XPoint memory: Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X. It's a 375GB SSD on a PCIe card. Initial limited availability starts today, for $1520, with broad availability in the second half of the year. In the second quarter, a 750GB PCIe model, and a 375GB model in the U.2 form factor will be released, and in the second half of the year, a 1.5TB PCIe card, and 750GB and 1.5TB U.2 stick, are planned.

Full news: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/intels-first-optane-ssd-375gb-that-you-can-also-use-as-ram/

The P4800X can do 550,000 read IOPS and 500,000 write IOPS, but critically, Intel says it achieves this even at low queue depths.

Thanked by 1akhfa

Comments

  • Where i work we are looking to get some of these for testing. It will be very intresting for sure .

  • YuraYura Member

    Low end, yes, this is screaming low end at me...

  • blackblack Member

    At least it'll drive down the prices of NVMe drives.

  • raindog308raindog308 Administrator, Veteran

    In other news, Bell Labs announced that UNIX v7 would offer "virtual memory" (some kind of new use-disk-as-ram thing?) sometime in 1979.

    Thanked by 2WSS M66B
  • $1520 for 375GB is almost as expensive as ram. Would frankly rather have a pcie ramdisk, with the box on a UPS so the ramdisk could be saved to HDD in case of shutdown or power outage.

  • Have you guys not read the article? I think you haven't. Here's a few highlights:

    • Writes byte by byte instead of 512 bytes
    • Has a latency of 1/1000 of NAND flash
    • 10 times denser than DRAM
    • Has 30 DWPD endurance (Your regular consumer SSD has like 0.2-0.3 DWPD endurance and highest enterprise ones have 10 DWPD)
    • Cherry on top: It can combine itself with memory and expose the total space as memory to the OS. i.e: OS fuck ups won't affect it.
  • Well, there goes the "I rebooted the PC before the SWAT team entered the living room" technique. @joepie

  • @deadbeef said:
    Well, there goes the "I rebooted the PC before the SWAT team entered the living room" technique. @joepie

    I think you meant to tag @joepie91 there

  • @teamacc said:

    @deadbeef said:
    Well, there goes the "I rebooted the PC before the SWAT team entered the living room" technique. @joepie

    I think you meant to tag @joepie91 there

    Yeah, thanks - didn't remember the username well, so I half-arsed it :)

  • xyzxyz Member

    serverian said: Writes byte by byte instead of 512 bytes

    I'm somewhat skeptical over this. Byte by byte is extremely inefficient, and not even DRAM does this (SDRAM uses 8 byte transfers, but CPUs often operate on cachelines, which are 64 bytes). Byte addressable makes sense, but it makes no sense to write byte by byte (especially with such high latency that Optane has).
    Nonetheless, it's likely an improvement over 512 bytes.

    serverian said: Has a latency of 1/1000 of NAND flash

    SSD latency is around 100us (~10K IOPS @QD1), Optane claims 10us, so it's more like 1/10th of NAND. (Intel's initial claim was 1000x faster, but it doesn't seem to have eventuated)
    For reference, DRAM (non-NUMA'd) is typically 0.05us.

    Still, 10x better latency is very good. I suspect that servers can generally operate at higher QD, which erases some of the advantage, but there's definitely applications for better latency.

    Perhaps the PCIe interface limits the potential of XPoint. DIMMs should probably allow further reduction in latency, so it may be interesting to see the performance of that (and not so much the price).

    Other major win is the consistency in performance despite load - very useful for servers, particularly in shared environments.

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