Intel "launches" Optane for the consumer market

[AnonymousGuy]

Hi, I'm Intel's unofficial marketing team!  a) This thing isn't meant for enthusiasts.  Intel knows this.  It's not for you, so stop trying to find enthusiast scenarios where these micro NVME sticks make sense.  b) There will be a successor to the 750 series based on the same technology in high capacities.  It's going to shit all over the 960 Pro in QD1 scenarios.  99% of a consumer/enthusiast workload is at QD < 4, and most is random R/W of small files, not large sequential files or at QD32 that everyone advertises at.

 

This thing is basically a way for OEM's to sell 2TB WD Blue systems that kinda sorta act like an SSD.  Grandma won't notice that she's not on a pure SSD, in theory.

[NumLock21]

I remember the old RST, Intel being Intel, limited to just 64GB for caching, while some motherboards have their custom cache and can go all the way up to 128GB or more. Trying to get it working is If I recall, a pain. Getting a SSHD is a lot easier and it's basically the same thing.

[Notional]

How desperate has Intel become, to make this a proprietary, vendor locked in tech to Kaby Lake? The BS they are pulling in china with the I3 is bad enough, but this is just pathetic.

As for the tech itself, it seems extremely underwhelming. Why not just spend the money on a bigger SSD? It's better in the end anyways.

[MandelFrac]

4 hours ago, Notional said:

How desperate has Intel become, to make this a proprietary, vendor locked in tech to Kaby Lake? The BS they are pulling in china with the I3 is bad enough, but this is just pathetic.

As for the tech itself, it seems extremely underwhelming. Why not just spend the money on a bigger SSD? It's better in the end anyways.

It's not locked to Kaby Lake. Skylake E5/E7 will get this too, which will prove highly useful for database apps.

 

The tech is far from underwhelming. The latency is half (or even less in some cases) what you get on the 960 Pro, and the throughput at QD1/2/4 vs. the 960 Pro blows it out of the water altogether. And Intel is providing larger SSDs on plain old NVMe, but this caching tech definitely has its uses, especially for power loss protection and result caching from DB apps.

[Notional]

47 minutes ago, MandelFrac said:

It's not locked to Kaby Lake. Skylake E5/E7 will get this too, which will prove highly useful for database apps.

 

The tech is far from underwhelming. The latency is half (or even less in some cases) what you get on the 960 Pro, and the throughput at QD1/2/4 vs. the 960 Pro blows it out of the water altogether. And Intel is providing larger SSDs on plain old NVMe, but this caching tech definitely has its uses, especially for power loss protection and result caching from DB apps.

Skylake E is not even X99, it's x299 if I'm not mistaken. Point is, it's not backwards compatible (for no good reason), and it's still vendor locked in.

 

It's still only a measly 16GB (or 32). You'd be better off just buying more RAM, which would be much faster in every regard anyways. Or buy more SSD space. For some datacenters, I'm sure it's useful. For consumers it's a waste of time and money. fF they manage to make it, say 250GB or 500GB, then it's a different matter, but until then, it's just pointless.

[MandelFrac]

24 minutes ago, Notional said:

Skylake E is not even X99, it's x299 if I'm not mistaken. Point is, it's not backwards compatible (for no good reason), and it's still vendor locked in.

 

It's still only a measly 16GB (or 32). You'd be better off just buying more RAM, which would be much faster in every regard anyways. Or buy more SSD space. For some datacenters, I'm sure it's useful. For consumers it's a waste of time and money. fF they manage to make it, say 250GB or 500GB, then it's a different matter, but until then, it's just pointless.

For caching there was no way for it to be backwards compatible afaik.

 

And no, it will come in higher capacities as demanded. For now that is where the demand sits.

 

The RAM would be far more expensive, and the volatility of it means in a catastrophic power failure you could lose crucial data or corrupt it. With 3DXPoint, that's no longer a risk.

 

And I'm sorry but for a cache that isn't even addressable, you want 250-500GB? No, you're unreasonable. The NVMe drives come in those capacities. Just buy those. They're compatible with any NVMe board.

[Notional]

2 minutes ago, MandelFrac said:

For caching there was no way for it to be backwards compatible afaik.

 

And no, it will come in higher capacities as demanded. For now that is where the demand sits.

 

The RAM would be far more expensive, and the volatility of it means in a catastrophic power failure you could lose crucial data or corrupt it. With 3DXPoint, that's no longer a risk.

 

And I'm sorry but for a cache that isn't even addressable, you want 250-500GB? No, you're unreasonable. The NVMe drives come in those capacities. Just buy those. They're compatible with any NVMe board.

I'm sure a simple chipset upgrade or microcode update could support it.

No, it's the price that is so high, Intel won't release any better for consumers, as no one would buy it.

RAM is still volatile whether you have Optane or not. You would still lose/corrupt data. If your work is important you get a UPS.

No I want 350-500GB of addressable 3Dxpoint.

[MandelFrac]

10 minutes ago, Notional said:

I'm sure a simple chipset upgrade or microcode update could support it.

No, it's the price that is so high, Intel won't release any better for consumers, as no one would buy it.

RAM is still volatile whether you have Optane or not. You would still lose/corrupt data. If your work is important you get a UPS.

No I want 350-500GB of addressable 3Dxpoint.

You being "sure of it" doesn't mean crap. Chipsets are designed to be very minimalistic and hold barely more EPROM than the functionality that they start with requires. It's just enough to add new CPUs and fix mistakes of microcode.

Everything streamed to RAM from disk and back goes through the 3DXPoint cache, so there's no way to lose something small but important in-flight, and UPS does not fix all. The slightest power fluctuation can flip a bit or even blow away multiple bytes of data in the wire.

 

You can have 500GB of addressable 3DXPoint in an NVMe drive. You just have to pay the price for it.

[leadeater]

@MandelFrac @Notional

The enterprise Optane devices are regular PCIe accelerator cards, already a news thread showing it, and will work on anything. Only the desktop Optane SSDs for caching require Kaby Lake or newer and aren't really anything like server Optane other than the memory technology.

 

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/optane-solid-state-drives-dc-p4800x-series.html

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/19/optane_ssd_released/

http://www.storagereview.com/intel_optane_ssd_dc_p4800x_enterprise_ssd_launched

[Sniperfox47]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

@MandelFrac @Notional

The enterprise Optane devices are regular PCIe accelerator cards, already a news thread showing it, and will work on anything. Only the desktop Optane SSDs for caching require Kaby Lake or newer and aren't really anything like server Optane other than the memory technology.

 

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/optane-solid-state-drives-dc-p4800x-series.html

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/19/optane_ssd_released/

http://www.storagereview.com/intel_optane_ssd_dc_p4800x_enterprise_ssd_launched

It also isn't designed for Windows. Memory Drive requires you to use RHEL or SLES as your OS.

[MandelFrac]

43 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

It also isn't designed for Windows. Memory Drive requires you to use RHEL or SLES as your OS.

Intel betraying Microsoft and the Wintel alliance? Hmm...

[Sniperfox47]

1 minute ago, MandelFrac said:

Intel betraying Microsoft and the Wintel alliance? Hmm...

It's more due to how memory management is handled on Windows vs Linux.

 

On Windows, it just kind of assumes a conventional hardware setup, even in the server version. While Microsoft could probably modify their memory stack to work with Optane, it's not something Intel can just hand them a patch for.

 

Whereas on Linux, memory is just another driver layer in the kernel. Modifying memory to work over alternative carriers like PCIe is actually pretty easy on Linux. It's just another memory driver module for Intel to tack on.

 

What's not clear to me is whether KVM will support it (as in whether if you have a RHEL or SLES host OS, you can use Memory Drive and KVM to host a Windows Server guest that can make use of Memory Drive)

[MandelFrac]

1 minute ago, Sniperfox47 said:

It's more due to how memory management is handled on Windows vs Linux.

 

On Windows, it just kind of assumes a conventional hardware setup, even in the server version. While Microsoft could probably modify their memory stack to work with Optane, it's not something Intel can just hand them a patch for.

 

Whereas on Linux, memory is just another driver layer in the kernel. Modifying memory to work over alternative carriers like PCIe is actually pretty easy on Linux. It's just another memory driver module for Intel to tack on.

 

What's not clear to me is whether KVM will support it (as in whether if you have a RHEL or SLES host OS, you can use Memory Drive and KVM to host a Windows Server guest that can make use of Memory Drive)

I'd be really surprised if Intel didn't immediately start helping Hypervisor vendors. AWS and Abu Dabi are both huge markets to surrender to Samsung if it doesn't.

[Sniperfox47]

2 minutes ago, MandelFrac said:

I'd be really surprised if Intel didn't immediately start helping Hypervisor vendors. AWS and Abu Dabi are both huge markets to surrender to Samsung if it doesn't.

Why would AWS or AbuDabi need Memory Drive? For those kinds of platforms wouldn't the NVDIMMs due out later this year be a better option anyways?

 

Memory Drive is just for their PCIe Optane drives to act as a RAM pool with system RAM.

[MandelFrac]

1 minute ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Why would AWS or AbuDabi need Memory Drive? For those kinds of platforms wouldn't the NVDIMMs due out later this year be a better option anyways?

 

Memory Drive is just for their PCIe Optane drives to act as a RAM pool with system RAM.

In-memory databases.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Sniperfox47 said:

It also isn't designed for Windows. Memory Drive requires you to use RHEL or SLES as your OS.

It still works as a legacy NVMe SSD though so if you need low queue depth performance or ultra low latency under windows you can use it.

 

Quote

The drive acts just like an SSD and its performance profile offers new levels of performance to something like a small database that can fit on the drive. The P4800X can also extend memory pools by sharing system memory with the SSD via an additional (cost not disclosed) Linux-based caching software. This would result in a larger, more affordable memory footprint leading to the ability to gain new insights via analytics.

 

[Sniperfox47]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

It still works as a legacy NVMe SSD though so if you need low queue depth performance or ultra low latency under windows you can use it.

 

 

Yeah, but cost per performance isn't really great for those applications, even for an enterprise drive.

 

For specific applications that require the super low latency or low queue depth, sure it has it's uses, but for those I'd question whether Windows is really the right choice of OS.

 

And for general purpose wide scale adoption there's better options available, not that it's really marketed as being for general purpose use.

 

[leadeater]

13 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Yeah, but cost per performance isn't really great for those applications, even for an enterprise drive.

 

For specific applications that require the super low latency or low queue depth, sure it has it's uses, but for those I'd question whether Windows is really the right choice of OS.

 

And for general purpose wide scale adoption there's better options available, not that it's really marketed as being for general purpose use.

 

Well Windows isn't as crap for I/O as it's generally made out to be, not anymore, but yea normal high-end NVMe SSDs is more than enough for 99% of use cases on a Windows server.

 

I can think of two uses that I'd try it out for on a Windows server just to see how it compares; Commvault DDB and Storage Spaces Direct cache + Hyper-V.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server-docs/storage/storage-spaces/understand-the-cache

[Notional]

15 hours ago, leadeater said:

@MandelFrac @Notional

The enterprise Optane devices are regular PCIe accelerator cards, already a news thread showing it, and will work on anything. Only the desktop Optane SSDs for caching require Kaby Lake or newer and aren't really anything like server Optane other than the memory technology.

 

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/solid-state-drives/optane-solid-state-drives-dc-p4800x-series.html

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/19/optane_ssd_released/

http://www.storagereview.com/intel_optane_ssd_dc_p4800x_enterprise_ssd_launched

Yeah I know that much. But this thread is specifically about the consumer cache thing, which just seems completely pointless. Most laptops today have large SSD's, even the cheap ones. So getting this thing plus a "large" HDD just seems dumb.

[Inycz]

Have 2 x 2TB 960 Pros in RAID 0. The Maximus ix formula has two m.2 slots one covered one sticking out. The temps on the covered slot skyrocket real quick under load. Especially when it sitting behind two 1080s.  So I started just using the asus hyper card temps went down. So my question is will there be any increase in performance if I put the optane in the open m.2 slot?

[leadeater]

49 minutes ago, Inycz said:

Have 2 x 2TB 960 Pros in RAID 0. The Maximus ix formula has two m.2 slots one covered one sticking out. The temps on the covered slot skyrocket real quick under load. Especially when it sitting behind two 1080s.  So I started just using the asus hyper card temps went down. So my question is will there be any increase in performance if I put the optane in the open m.2 slot?

No, these Optane SSDs are for caching HDDs to improve performance. Caching SSDs if you even can won't result in any noticeable difference, NVMe SSDs are particularly not likely to be able to be cached since there is little point and Intel wouldn't see that as a likely use case since they are already so fast.

[MandelFrac]

23 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Yeah, but cost per performance isn't really great for those applications, even for an enterprise drive.

 

For specific applications that require the super low latency or low queue depth, sure it has it's uses, but for those I'd question whether Windows is really the right choice of OS.

 

And for general purpose wide scale adoption there's better options available, not that it's really marketed as being for general purpose use.

 

Yes it is. Do you see how it smashes the 960 pro at QD 1/2/4? That's where most applications, even in enterprise, operate.

 

10 hours ago, Inycz said:

Have 2 x 2TB 960 Pros in RAID 0. The Maximus ix formula has two m.2 slots one covered one sticking out. The temps on the covered slot skyrocket real quick under load. Especially when it sitting behind two 1080s.  So I started just using the asus hyper card temps went down. So my question is will there be any increase in performance if I put the optane in the open m.2 slot?

Not with this product, but Intel does have dedicated NVMe Optane SSDs, and you would see fairly large gains.

[Flavio hc 16]

http://m.hexus.net/tech/news/storage/104143-intel-optane-cache-drives-play-budget-kaby-lake-cpus/

You want to have fun? No optane for kaby lake pentium and celerons...just ridicolous

[Sniperfox47]

2 hours ago, Flavio hc 16 said:

http://m.hexus.net/tech/news/storage/104143-intel-optane-cache-drives-play-budget-kaby-lake-cpus/

You want to have fun? No optane for kaby lake pentium and celerons...just ridicolous

How is this ridiculous? They've said since the start that it requires a 200 series chipset and a 7th generation I series processor. That's a Kaby lake i3, i5, or i7, and one of the z2XX, B2XX, or H2XX boards.

[Flavio hc 16]

11 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

How is this ridiculous? They've said since the start that it requires a 200 series chipset and a 7th generation I series processor. That's a Kaby lake i3, i5, or i7, and one of the z2XX, B2XX, or H2XX boards.

 

g4560 and suck are kaby lake cpus, i'm not complaining about the mobos