Intel 3D XPoint Optane SSD DC P4800X Tested

[It's me!]

Well, they finally got their hands on Optane! Looks impressive  Certainly the fastest, ever!

 

 

Quote

The elusive 3D XPoint non-volatile memory technology is finally ready. Well, kind of. You see, we don't actually have it set up in our lab yet. Intel has a keen interest in keeping its new progeny under the strictest of wraps, so we weren’t actually allowed to take possession of the 3D XPoint-powered ‘Cold Stream’ Optane SSD DC P4800X. Instead, the company offered us an opportunity to remotely test the drive in a top-secret lab tucked away on its Folsom, CA campus. Of course, we had to get our hands on the hottest storage device ever, if only virtually. And in the end, we came away with some impressive preliminary numbers.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-optane-3d-xpoint-p4800x,5030.html

 

[tlink]

dark theme makes reading so much easier /s

 

[Tomsen]

13 minutes ago, It's me! said:

Well, they finally got their hands on Optane!

Going by what you quoted, they didn't.

[PocketNerd]

Isn't Optane just a giant cache to turn any HDD into a Hybrid, that actually takes up an extra HDD/SSD slot to use?

[Coaxialgamer]

2 minutes ago, PocketNerd said:

Isn't Optane just a giant cache to turn any HDD into a Hybrid, that actually takes up an extra HDD/SSD slot to use?

It can be. It can also be used for plenty of other things. 

[AnonymousGuy]

This is why I put my Kaby Lake build on hold until the consumer 900p variant gets released.  XPoint wrecks the asshole of every other SSD at QD1.

[DocSwag]

1 minute ago, AnonymousGuy said:

This is why I put my Kaby Lake build on hold until the consumer 900p variant gets released.  XPoint wrecks the asshole of every other SSD at QD1.

Still, for boot up and app launching XPoint isn't worth it, since other things hold back modern day ssds.

[2FA]

5 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Still, for boot up and app launching XPoint isn't worth it, since other things hold back modern day ssds.

Doesn't matter, epeen gets larger with 3D XPoint.

[DocSwag]

4 minutes ago, DeadEyePsycho said:

Doesn't matter, epeen gets larger with 3D XPoint.

"10x lower latency!"

"Over 90,000 IOPs!" (I know it's higher but I had to )

[AnonymousGuy]

5 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Still, for boot up and app launching XPoint isn't worth it, since other things hold back modern day ssds.

App load and boot times haven't really mattered for a while.  This is going to be fucking awesome when you'll be the first in a BF1 map change by several seconds because you can load up all the textures and objects 5x faster than the next fastest guy.

[DocSwag]

2 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

App load and boot times haven't really mattered for a while.  This is going to be fucking awesome when you'll be the first in a BF1 map change by several seconds because you can load up all the textures and objects 5x faster than the next fastest guy.

But what I'm saying is 3D XPoint probably won't actually change that, since other things are the bottleneck.

[leadeater]

Holy crap that really is much faster, the latency figures are amazing.

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 hours ago, AnonymousGuy said:

App load and boot times haven't really mattered for a while.  This is going to be fucking awesome when you'll be the first in a BF1 map change by several seconds because you can load up all the textures and objects 5x faster than the next fastest guy.

The match isn't going to start until another player comes in anyway, so...

[AnonymousGuy]

Just now, M.Yurizaki said:

The match isn't going to start until another player comes in anyway, so...

Yeah but when you're trying to reserve yourself in the tank....

[Rune]

Quote

• 4K Random Read/Write IOPS

  up to 550/500K

• 4K Random 70/30 Read/Write Mix

  up to 500K

• Endurance

  30 DWPD - 12.3 Petabytes Written

What in the actual fuck I need this.

[CommandMan7]

Something I still fail to understand after all the reviews and articles posted on 3D Xpoint is what speed does it transfer at in Mbps? For example, the Samsung 960 pro is rated at 3500 Mbps read and 2100 Mbps write, but I can find no such info for 3D Xpoint. Low latency is nice and all, but it's only a part of the picture. Unless this is significantly faster than traditional SSD's (something like 10,000 Mbps or higher) I doubt this has any application in the consumer market.

[NumLock21]

Intel should name the consumer optane ssd 1080p

 

 

[Dylanc1500]

2 hours ago, CommandMan7 said:

Something I still fail to understand after all the reviews and articles posted on 3D Xpoint is what speed does it transfer at in Mbps? For example, the Samsung 960 pro is rated at 3500 Mbps read and 2100 Mbps write, but I can find no such info for 3D Xpoint. Low latency is nice and all, but it's only a part of the picture. Unless this is significantly faster than traditional SSD's (something like 10,000 Mbps or higher) I doubt this has any application in the consumer market.

It's a mix of latency and que depth. Those drives like the 960 pro are rated at a que depth of 128 and sometimes 256. You run it at que depth 1 it drops clear down to 34 MB/s and IOPs of 13k. The p4800x however is roughly 425MB/s and 110k IOPs at que depth 1. Random 4k read for both drives.

[Misanthrope]

Company controlled tests are basically bullshit: don't care if they turn out to be accurate it just wouldn't be a full, objective picture and henceforth need to be avoided whenever it's intel or AMD (from recent memory on Ryzen launch)

[mynameisjuan]

3 hours ago, CommandMan7 said:

Something I still fail to understand after all the reviews and articles posted on 3D Xpoint is what speed does it transfer at in Mbps? For example, the Samsung 960 pro is rated at 3500 Mbps read and 2100 Mbps write, but I can find no such info for 3D Xpoint. Low latency is nice and all, but it's only a part of the picture. Unless this is significantly faster than traditional SSD's (something like 10,000 Mbps or higher) I doubt this has any application in the consumer market.

Sequential read/writes are useless. Thats why they are not mentioned. 

 

All performance is based on IOPs and latency. 99% of everything file you read is small and therefor relies upon IOPS. 

[79wjd]

So how far off from RAM is this? and what's the theoretical max for optane?

[AnonymousGuy]

3 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

Sequential read/writes are useless. Thats why they are not mentioned. 

 

All performance is based on IOPs and latency. 99% of everything file you read is small and therefor relies upon IOPS. 

Something like 99% of workload happens at QD<4 (info provided by Intel).  It's a joke that SSDs are "rated" at QD32.

[Bit_Guardian]

6 hours ago, CommandMan7 said:

Something I still fail to understand after all the reviews and articles posted on 3D Xpoint is what speed does it transfer at in Mbps? For example, the Samsung 960 pro is rated at 3500 Mbps read and 2100 Mbps write, but I can find no such info for 3D Xpoint. Low latency is nice and all, but it's only a part of the picture. Unless this is significantly faster than traditional SSD's (something like 10,000 Mbps or higher) I doubt this has any application in the consumer market.

At higher queue depths, about 2.2GBps just like the 960 Pro. The thing is, it transfers at close to 500MBps at QD1, unlike most SSDs which are barely pushing 100MBps at that point.

 

Most consumer workloads are QD1/2/4, which is why 3DXP is an SSD killer in terms of performance. You WILL feel it.

[Bit_Guardian]

2 hours ago, djdwosk97 said:

So how far off from RAM is this? and what's the theoretical max for optane?

For this product at high Queue depths the throughput is around 2.2GBPs. The controller seems like it was optimized for low queue depth operations, in which it slaughters other SSDs both consumer and enterprise anyway.

 

Theoretically, it can transfer at speeds well above the limit of the PCIe interface.

[Zodiark1593]

8 hours ago, Bit_Guardian said:

At higher queue depths, about 2.2GBps just like the 960 Pro. The thing is, it transfers at close to 500MBps at QD1, unlike most SSDs which are barely pushing 100MBps at that point.

 

Most consumer workloads are QD1/2/4, which is why 3DXP is an SSD killer in terms of performance. You WILL feel it.

Even if Optane is 100x faster than SSDs, as of now, given the expense and lack of systems that can actually use it (unless for some reason, you went Kaby over Ryzen), it's current relevance in the consumer space is limited. 

 

If anything, this is really a preview of what we may see in the coming decade. And given the slow progress in cpu performance, the uptake of new platforms that can use Optane will be similarly slow.