Intel Optane.... Why?

[corrado33]

Intel Optane's technology is essentially a very small and quick SSD that you can plug into your PCIe slot. However, I'm a bit confused. Why? M.2 NVMe drives are nearly as quick. (And already use some PCIe lanes.) Stats I've found put Optane at sequential reads up to 2.5 GB/s and sequential writes at up to 2 GB/s. M.2 NVMe drives have sequential reads of 3 GB/s and writes of 1 GB/s. 

 

As for comparing it to RAM... it's not even... close. DDR4 transfer rates are ~ 25 GB/s. That's an order of magnitude greater. 

 

How on earth are people advertising this as "memory." It's barely any faster than putting your page file onto your PCIe SSD. 

 

I thought... maybe it'd be good if you had PCIe 3.0 on a DDR3 board, but even then the slowest DDR3 memory is 6.4GB/s. I don't... know if any DDR2 boards exist with PCIE 3.0. Even if you had a DDR2 board with PCIe 2.0, it'd be limited to 2 GB/s, which is still lower than the SLOWEST DDR2 memory, hell, it's only faster than the ABSOLUTE SLOWEST DDR memory... DDR-200. 

 

I mean, with optane being so expensive and ram being so cheap (relatively) (and so much faster) why on EARTH would you even think about using a NVMe drive as memory or a page file? 

 

Am I missing something? Does Optane have better longevity or something? 

[Fasauceome]

It's memory for a storage device, acting as huge, fast cache. Although, Linus tested it as system memory and it actually worked out pretty well.

[corrado33]

2 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

It's memory for a storage device, acting as huge, fast cache. Although, Linus tested it as system memory and it actually worked out pretty well.

Isn't that what apple's "Hybrid drives" did like... a decade ago? What's the difference between optane and just a normal M.2 NVMe drive? When you install optane, does it appear as a drive? Or what?

[Fasauceome]

1 minute ago, corrado33 said:

Isn't that what apple's "Hybrid drives" did like... a decade ago? What's the difference between optane and just a normal M.2 NVMe drive? When you install optane, does it appear as a drive? Or what?

Optane supplements an existing drive. Yeah, it basically makes a hybrid drive.

[Enstage]

As per Linus' video, it's especially handy for game drives. This is the configuration I run Optane in, I have a 6TB HDD for my games, and it's accelerated by Optane, that way the games I play super frequently get SSD like performance, but I still have HDD like storage for larger games.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Its bandwidth isn't what makes it great, it's its random performance. It utterly destroys Samsung's NVMe drives in random performance:

 

 

Although it's an older blog, Microsoft posted some interesting statistics about how data in memory gets moved around to explain why SSDs are important to use as system storage.

 

Quote

Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,

 

Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.

 

Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

Basically, when used as memory or cache between storage and memory, read performance for tiny amounts of data is much more important because that's the most frequent event.

[corrado33]

15 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Its bandwidth isn't what makes it great, it's its random performance. It utterly destroys Samsung's NVMe drives in random performance:

 

-snip-

How? Why is it so much better than typical NVMe drives? Why not just make an NVMe drive in the same style? 

 

Is it possible to "make" a hybrid drive just using a normal SSD and HDD? Wouldn't that achieve the same effect? What type of processes would benefit from this the most? I'd imagine that most applications, once loaded into traditional memory, wouldn't use this at all. Games would probably benefit if you had them on a HDD. But even so, no game I've every played has used more than 8 or 9 Gigs of ram, why are they simply not programmed to use more to speed up loading? 

 

A la "If player is near load zone, start putting load zone into memory." 

[porina]

5 minutes ago, corrado33 said:

How? Why is it so much better than typical NVMe drives? Why not just make an NVMe drive in the same style? 

Flash based SSDs operate on a page basis, whereas Xpoint (which Optane uses) is closer to ram where you can change it a bit at a time if you wanted to. You simply can't make flash do that.

 

Also on pricing, Xpoint is far cheaper than ram, per GB. It is being implemented as a DRAM substitute, but only in server applications for now. It doesn't affect consumers so much, but if your server requires TB of ram, the savings could be massive.

[Mira Yurizaki]

9 minutes ago, corrado33 said:

How? Why is it so much better than typical NVMe drives? Why not just make an NVMe drive in the same style? 

Because 3D XPoint is a different type of memory that's much faster to access than regular flash. Also Intel makes Optane as a storage device, but it's way more expensive than the equivalent flash based NVMe of the same capacity, because it's a new type of memory.

 

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Is it possible to "make" a hybrid drive just using a normal SSD and HDD? Wouldn't that achieve the same effect?

Yes, but you'd have to get Intel and Micron to agree on licensing that technology first.

Quote

What type of processes would benefit from this the most?

Databases, off the top of my head.

 

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I'd imagine that most applications, once loaded into traditional memory, wouldn't use this at all. Games would probably benefit if you had them on a HDD. But even so, no game I've every played has used more than 8 or 9 Gigs of ram, why are they simply not programmed to use more to speed up loading? 

 

A la "If player is near load zone, start putting load zone into memory." 

Games do this already and are either designed to slow you down so you won't see a loading screen or mask that it's loading, or the data is packed in such a way that it doesn't need as much bandwidth. Also this use case is geared more towards bandwidth, not access time.