Optaine DIMMs to launch with Cascade Lake in 2018

[WMGroomAK]

Now that we've seen Optane based memory released to the public in a drive format, Intel is promising to release their Optane DIMMs in 2018 alongside their Cascade Lake Xeons.  From Tech Report:

 

http://techreport.com/news/31932/optane-dimms-and-companion-cpus-will-arrive-in-2018

Quote

Intel's Optane Memory tech showcases what 3D Xpoint memory can do on a limited scale, but the potential for Optane extends well beyond hard-drive acceleration. Intel began shipping Optane DIMMs to partners for testing early this year, and yesterday the company committed to delivering Optane DIMMs as a product called "Intel persistent memory" alongside a refresh of its Xeon Processor Scalable family called Cascade Lake. Both the persistent memory product and Cascade Lake CPUs will arrive sometime in 2018.

 

Intel says that Optane DIMMs will upend the traditional "small, volatile, and expensive" view of system memory by providing a much denser and persistent way of putting data close to the processor, all at lower prices than DRAM. The company showed off these potential benefits at the SAP Sapphire conference by running the ERP giant's HANA analytics tool on a pool of Optane DIMMs. Intel says that for in-memory database apps like HANA, these DIMMs will be a no-brainer for improving performance because of the much larger data sets they'll put closer to CPUs.

 

Now that we have some kind of timeline for their release, Intel has also discussed some use cases for these DIMMs involving mass virtualization and private clouds in enterprise environments to cloud hosting and search applications in public clouds and high performance computing.  I would think that this kind of tech combined with something like Google's Data Centers and AI would significantly speed up their prediction and neural networks...  One of the interesting items they mention is that they are calling for this to be less expensive than DRAM in addition to all the benefits (definitely believe it once I see it), however that could make for some great upgrade paths once this hits consumer market beyond 2018.

 

Intel IT Peer Network: https://itpeernetwork.intel.com/new-breakthrough-persistent-memory-first-public-demo/

[DocSwag]

Cascade Lake? Is this a refresh only for xeons or also for consumers?

[WMGroomAK]

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

Cascade Lake? Is this a refresh only for xeons or also for consumers?

So far, it sounds like a refresh for the Xeon line of processors...

[DocSwag]

Just now, WMGroomAK said:

So far, it sounds like a refresh for the Xeon line of processors...

If it includes consumers, then we'd have so many skylake based cpus  

[RadiatingLight]

6 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

If it includes consumers, then we'd have so many skylake based cpus  

To Recap:

 

Sky Lake (2016)

Kaby Lake (2017)

Cannon Lake (2018)

Coffee Lake (2018)

Cascade Lake (2018)

Ice Lake (2019)

Tiger Lake (2020)

 

WTF

 

[DocSwag]

Just now, RadiatingLight said:

To Recap:

 

Sky Lake (2016)

Kaby Lake (2017)

Cannon Lake (2018)

Coffee Lake (2018)

Cascade Lake (2018)

Tiger Lake (2019)

Ice Lake (2019)

 

WTF

 

So many lakes.

[WMGroomAK]

Just now, DocSwag said:

So many lakes.

Intel must be moving to Minnesota...  Conspiracy found! 

[Taf the Ghost]

58 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

To Recap:

 

Sky Lake (2016)

Kaby Lake (2017)

Cannon Lake (2018)

Coffee Lake (2018)

Cascade Lake (2018)

Ice Lake (2019)

Tiger Lake (2020)

 

WTF

 

So, is the head of the CPU division from Minnesota? 

[outercry]

Could also be Finnish

[outercry]

Especially Coffee Lake

[Cheezdoodlez]

Still better names then Threadripper or Epyc.. 

[mr moose]

1 hour ago, RadiatingLight said:

To Recap:

 

Sky Lake (2016)

Kaby Lake (2017)

Cannon Lake (2018)

Coffee Lake (2018)

Cascade Lake (2018)

Ice Lake (2019)

Tiger Lake (2020)

 

WTF

 

Luke Luck likes lakes.
Luke's duck likes lakes.
Luke Luck licks lakes.
Luck's duck licks lakes.

Duck takes licks in lakes Luke Luck likes.
Luke Luck takes licks in lakes duck likes.

 

Intel can go frown in one if this continues...

[tlink]

isn't the downside of these higher latency? the improvements are workload specific and not all around if im not mistaken.

[rhyseyness]

This is lake-ing amazing

[porina]

3 hours ago, tlink said:

isn't the downside of these higher latency? the improvements are workload specific and not all around if im not mistaken.

Can't find numbers right now, but from memory it is higher latency and lower bandwidth than ram, the tradeoff you're making with it is you get more capacity per cost compared to ram. It fills in the gap between ram and SSD. Great if you're after quantity more than speed. I believe that they also have an in-between write life. Much better than traditional SSD, but still worse than ram which is for most practically unlimited.

 

What might be interesting is if this might start to become standard in low cost systems. You can still lower cost in non-performance scenarios with it, compared to conventional ram. Even get into the state where the "ram" and "SSD" are actually the same device, and you can reallocate dynamically between them according to the usage. Probably some way off that...

[2bitmarksman]

The latency is about 10x slower than RAM but higher capacity than RAM, much faster Q depth 1 speeds compared to SSDs and much higher write cycles in its life than a regulard SSD. This could make some really neat and powerful small profile servers or save drive space and power, give much higher RAM capacities, and great performance for VMs.

 

What I would love to see are some consumer products for this that could make use of this, like ultrathin but powerful and spacious laptops/tablets. With Thunderbolt being a thing it could be possible to have an extremely powerful laptop at home and a very powerful but small profile laptop on the go.

[tlink]

1 hour ago, 2bitmarksman said:

The latency is about 10x slower than RAM but higher capacity than RAM, much faster Q depth 1 speeds compared to SSDs and much higher write cycles in its life than a regulard SSD. This could make some really neat and powerful small profile servers or save drive space and power, give much higher RAM capacities, and great performance for VMs.

 

What I would love to see are some consumer products for this that could make use of this, like ultrathin but powerful and spacious laptops/tablets. With Thunderbolt being a thing it could be possible to have an extremely powerful laptop at home and a very powerful but small profile laptop on the go.

wouldn't thunderbolt bottleneck it massively and create a huge latency? i always thought ram dimms are right next to the socket because the closer they are the lower the latancy. maybe when we have a combination of photon electron based computing, latency could be way less of an issue then with optic fiber ram channels or something. but thats all way way in the future imo.

[WMGroomAK]

1 hour ago, 2bitmarksman said:

The latency is about 10x slower than RAM but higher capacity than RAM, much faster Q depth 1 speeds compared to SSDs and much higher write cycles in its life than a regulard SSD. This could make some really neat and powerful small profile servers or save drive space and power, give much higher RAM capacities, and great performance for VMs.

 

What I would love to see are some consumer products for this that could make use of this, like ultrathin but powerful and spacious laptops/tablets. With Thunderbolt being a thing it could be possible to have an extremely powerful laptop at home and a very powerful but small profile laptop on the go.

One benefit I can think of about having Optane DIMMs as opposed to typical DRAM would be that you are cutting down the access latency between your DRAM and your internal storage.  If they can expand the storage amounts on Optane DIMMs enough and have memory controllers on an enthusiast CPU that could handle several hundred GBs to TB scale memory then you could potentially move your OS and all of your main working/gaming applications into a where your DRAM would be.  Or maybe even create a scenario where you have one or two channels of standard DRAM for the decreased latency it provides and then one or two channels of Optane Memory for the retention capabilities in power off states.  

[AnonymousGuy]

You can have multiple TB of "system memory" now.  Yeah it's not as fast as DRAM, but it's faster than even a XPoint based NVME drive.  And supposedly it won't take any extra "effort" since the magic happens in the background.  It just looks like DRAM to the system.