Comment by 2bluesc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2bluesc | Hacker News Reader

Anandtech, as usual, has a good article:

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?

Interesting comment from Anandtech [0]

> 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...

Another factor is that these consumer Optane products only have 1 or 2 chips to multiplex operations across. Their enterprise product, the SSD DC P4800X uses 28 of the same 16GB chips and can read or write at ~2GB/s which is competitive with NVMe SSDs.

As far as I know, SSDs are closer to 0.1 ms latency (~10,000 random read IOPS at zero queue depth). That's still an improvement of more than an order of magnitude, though (0.009 ms according to the article).

100micro-seconds on writes.

Reads are as low as 20micro-seconds [1] This is using an Samsung 860pro, so a generation behind the current generation.

[1] https://www.cs.utah.edu/~manua/pubs/systor15.pdf

There was never a 860 pro, we had 850 pro (2.5" SATA) and then 950 and 960 pro which are m.2 only afaik (and nvme)

Dunno, I find 1.2-1.6GB/sec on my samsung s950 all the time. The benchmarks I've seen do not show any noticeable difference between SATA and NVMe. Sure geeks like the idea of a lower head protocol, but truth is the protocol is not the bottlneck.

Seems like Optane is a solution looking for a problem to fix. Normal M2 SATA's do fine: # dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null bs=131072 1953586+1 records in 1953586+1 records out 256060514304 bytes (256 GB, 238 GiB) copied, 159.18 s, 1.6 GB/s

(cold cache on a machine with 16GB ram).

You're looking at throughput numbers, but Optane appears to be solving a iop / latency problem.

You're not getting 1.6 GB/s out of a SATA drive that's communicating over a 600MB/s link. I think you may be confused about which products are using SATA vs PCIe.

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.

[1] https://semiaccurate.com/2017/03/10/intel-mislead-press-xpoi...

I understand why Intel claimed 100-1000x improvement: it's great for the stock. But what happens now if it's not true, will the stock loose all that gain ? or some of that gain will stay ?

And is it legal ?

I don't think there's anything illegal in ove-promising and severely under-delivering. Also, given the long delay of the 1st gen product release Intel's massive PR and marketing machinery had plenty of time to rewire many if not most people's expectations. Doesn't have the endurance and the orders of magnitude performance advantage promised? Just focus QD1 performance, feed 3-5-10x instead to the media for long enough, over-provision to be able to deliver an OK consumer product and keep everyone's hopes up that revolution will come "soon".

People have short memory (even tech journalists), especially when there is not enough competition.

You have to remember thus is a first gen product. Early ssd's were abysmal.

No, they really weren't. Early CHEAP SSDs from the likes of OCZ were horrible. I STILL have the first Intel SSD I bought - 80GB. It was awesome then and it's still awesome now. It's probably half the speed of modern SSDs, but even then it was several orders of magnitude better than any spinning rust that came before it.

The first gen SLC - from the likes of STEC were as fast if not faster than anything we have now, they were just ridiculously overpriced.

My disused Thinkpad x200 still has her My SSD Rocks sticker. But her SSD has been recycled into the media nuc.

The limitation back then was the controller. Intel figured out how to do it properly before anyone else. I still have an 80 GB X25-M G2 as well (read latency 65 µs [1]).

[1] http://techreport.com/review/17269/intel-second-generation-x...

The first SSDs were DRAM based and pretty fast for the time, see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_Y-MP. (SRAM, now used in CPU caches, was used for the whole main memory on that machine)

I'm wondering what market their actually aiming for? non-NVMe drive users?

If the gains aren't that significant, why would people buy it and why would PC maker want to use it?

Its pretty crap for the consumer market. Your typical MLC SSD (or even TLC SSD) over SATA is more than sufficient for the consumer market, at prices that actually will be used (although even a TLC SSD seems to be considered "high end" by my family members...)

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The Optane memory seems to have a niche in replacing DRAM servers. So instead of running Redis, MySQL, or Postgres on DRAM, you can run it on Optane instead.

Optane is cheaper than DDR4 but almost as fast (latency wise). Latency is a big deal when it comes to database and/or key-value pair workloads.

Er, what? Optane has half the latency of DDR4? Source?

One presentation was comparing an 8GB+HDD system to a 4GB+Optane+HDD system, showing off how the low RAM hybrid was much faster at selected tasks (carefully selected tasks, I presume). This is probably the market, another indication is the surprisingly low price.

The price difference between 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM cannot be enough to compensate for the Optane module, but if the Optane combination uses less battery than the bigger RAM and if enough benchmarks and/or magazine performance comparison use cases coincide with tasks where the hybrid shines, then some low end manufacturers might successfully sell the RAM downgrade as an upgrade option.

> "but if the Optane combination uses less battery than the bigger RAM"

With idle power specified as 0.9-1.2 W, I'm not expecting the Optane-based solutions to come out ahead on any battery life tests. PCIe power management is a horrific mess.

Could this be useful for some cloud storage? Using cheaper hdds while keeping low latency of the ssd?

Thanks ! Finally a place to lookup pricing information.

Also if you are already mmap'ing some big file which needs frequent access, I do not see how this will help ?

This. A RAM based cache sounds substantially more performant. I think this may be for clients that can't do much more than swap hardware to make their setup faster. Either it's a lack of control over their OS setup, or a desire to fine-tune caching for a specific device, or a lack of ability to change existing settings.

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