10 ms·
Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance
- imperialdrive 10y agoI just love this stuff! Storage minded for 20 years... all other tech aside, storage is what gets me up until sunrise researching... if 2017 sees this kind of tech, I'll be smitten :-D
- nashashmi 10y agoWon't there come a time when 1000x speed increase will still be slow? The applications will mostly be on heavy data side like medical research and weather patterns, but it could also involve 3D photogrammetry taking in a trillion points.
- brixon 10y agoYes, but storage speeds and battery life are the two biggest pain points for computers. Non-Multi-threading applications are starting to become a pain point.
- astrodust 10y agoYour average Instagram shot and filter involves more data processing power than NASA had in its entire supercomputer center in the 1960s. What will the 2060 Instagram be?
- nashashmi 10y agoIf SSDs and RAM reach the same speeds, could RAM become obsolete? If so, architecture of computers will change drastically.
- aeharding 10y agoOne of the slides mentioned it as a technology that can "serve as system memory and storage."
- markokrajnc 10y agoThis may really change software. In the mean time combine RAM and Optane SSD and you will get RAM read spead and permanent RAM storage...
- quantumhobbit 10y agoThey might reach the same throughput before getting similar latency, in which case RAM will stick around for a while despite SSds having the same or higher 'speeds'
- loeg 10y agoIf 3d Xpoint is cheaper, lower latency, and higher throughput than DRAM, yes, it will obsolete DRAM. Currently it is higher latency, and lower throughput. And it is cheaper on a per-GB basis, but with a much higher minimum GB (like, 128GB).
- toomuchtodo 10y agoDRAM doesn't wear though. Depending on your use case, you might not care if RAM is ephemeral. It just needs to be fast.
- loeg 10y agoYes, that's true (wear). Still, if 3d xpoint is durable enough and cheap/fast, it goes a long way towards obsoleting DRAM.
- lorenzhs 10y agoI don't think that it's intended to replace DRAM. It's going to be cheaper than DRAM (price-wise, I expect DRAM / 3DXpoint ≈ 3DXpoint / NAND), but significantly higher latency (the article says an order of magnitude, but those figures don't seem to include bus stuff etc, so it might be a bit more. Total latency will likely be in the range of a few hundred nanoseconds). That, and the limited durability (much higher than NAND, but still limited). I think this is going to be amazing for "in-memory" data bases: it's cheaper, still very fast, has higher capacity and is persistent (the article doesn't even mention that). But it won't replace DRAM any time soon imho.
- kijiki 10y agoEven if it just cheaper and same order of magnitude latency, it'll likely take over. High end systems would still have DRAM as a large L4/LLC cache, while low end ones will omit it.
- sorenjan 10y agoHewlett Packard Labs is working on something like that: http://www.labs.hpe.com/research/themachine/ http://www.labs.hpe.com/research/themachine/
- 1024core 10y ago.... for the last decade.
- PeCaN 10y agoLately I hear they spend their days playing Duke Nukem Forever on GNU/Hurd instead of working on memristors.
- soganess 10y agoI was HPE Discover and while HP Labs had a pretty big presence, "the machine"(what a name, huh?) was less present. In previous years, it was more center-stage. I am obviously overreaching, but that isn't a good sign.
- batmansmk 10y agoThis will change deeply how we make desktop applications, as well as database management systems.
- rudolf0 10y agoI'm almost afraid to see what hardware will look like in 10 years.
- maxerickson 10y agoDon't even think about the software it will take to make it feel slow.
- agumonkey 10y agoI'm rooting for the crapware camp to find new theories on how to make things slow.
- spitfire 10y agoIBM AS/400 did this decades ago. It has a unified address space - you only see "space" not disk/ram split.
- PeCaN 10y agoAS/400 still exists actually, under the name IBM i. I know a person who swears by them. It's a fascinating system. There are no files, only persistent objects living in a 128-bit address space. Downside: still uses EBCDIC….
- snaky 10y agoActually single-level store concept was introduced in Atlas, used in MULTICS, AS/400. [1] Some modern and quite high-performance solutions are using this concept, e.g. LMDB [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store [2] https://symas.com/getting-down-and-dirty-with-lmdb-qa-with-symas-corporations-howard-chu-about-symass-lightning-memory-mapped-database/ https://symas.com/getting-down-and-dirty-with-lmdb-qa-with-s...
- mtgx 10y agoThe 1,000x speed is so ridiculously misleading. It's basically comparing it to the slowest microSD on Earth...from a few years ago. I doubt the speed will be more than a few times faster than the current fastest NVMe SSDs (if that), and it will probably be even more expensive per Gbps (and per GB, too) than SSDs are. But it could still find some success in niche markets initially, if it has much better endurance and other features that may be interesting to some enterprise customers.
- xienze 10y agoYeah that's what I was thinking too... If it's so ridiculously fast, why's it on PCIe x4? Aren't we already getting close to saturating that many lanes with existing PCIe SSDs?
- MustardTiger 10y agoNo it is not, it is comparing latency, like it clearly shows in the chart.
- erik 10y ago1,000x performance, but they are introducing it with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface? That is suspicious. And then they are going to follow with a lower cost PCIe 3.0 x2 version? (That they still label as an Enthusiast / Workstation product?) I wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market so that you have to pay a lot for the "enterprise" product to get the full performance. Or, alternatively, if the real world performance is nowhere near the 1000x they keep talking about. I wonder if they will position these as replacements for you SSD, or if they are going to pitch them as a caching layer they way they dabbled in hybrid SSD/HDD approaches.
- wmf 10y agoI wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market... Intel always does this and Optane won't be any exception. The "1,000x" claims are either at the chip level (e.g. NAND block erase vs. XPoint word write) or maybe some access pattern that is worst-case for flash. It's physically impossible to get 1,000x improvement on common access patterns.
- MustardTiger 10y ago>The "1,000x" claims are either at the chip level It is latency.
- olavgg 10y agoBasically on a PCIe 3.0 x4 maximum performance is 4000GB/s, in practice this is 3200-3500MB/s. With 4k random write, you will get maximum 800.000 to 875.000 iops per second. Consumer-grade SSD's barely manage to write 500-1000 iops when sending the ATA_CMD_FLUSH command unless they are lying which is really bad. Good read about consumer SSD performance: http://www.sebastien-han.fr/blog/2014/10/10/ceph-how-to-test-if-your-ssd-is-suitable-as-a-journal-device/ http://www.sebastien-han.fr/blog/2014/10/10/ceph-how-to-test...
- erik 10y agoRight, elsewhere in these comments it was pointed out that they are talking about a 1,000x improvement in latency vs flash memory. If they are using PCIe x4 and x2, then it seems that their throughput isn't going to be much better than existing SSDs. Improved 4k random read and write would of course sill be a big win.
- bluecalm 10y agoSo your run of the mill SSD these days is like 500MB/s. Dual channel RAM @ 1600Mhz with 64bit bus is: 2 * 8bytes * 1 600 000 000 = 25.6GB/sec 500MB 1000x faster would be 500GB/sec or about 20x faster than standard RAM. That puts the claim in perspective :)
- narrator 10y ago500GB/Sec. the network is going to have to do some work to catch up to those speeds. We're going to see big iron replacing clusters until networking catches up.
- 1024core 10y agoYou're talking throughput. They're talking latency.
- bluecalm 10y agoYeah, I had a blind spot here. It's just throughput is all that matters for things I am doing so it didn't occur to me "performance" claims might about latency. Thanks for pointing that out.
- andrepd 10y ago1000x performance? 1000x relative to what? What's the actual figure we're looking at?
- nneonneo 10y agoTo be perfectly clear: the 1000x claim isn't about throughput, but latency. The graph in the article makes this clear: spinning drives have latencies on the order of 10ms, NAND flash about 10us, and DRAM about 1ns. The claim is that Optane will achieve latencies on the order of 10ns, or 1000x better than NAND. The on-stage benchmark shows a write throughput of about 2GB/s, which is a much more modest improvement over the 500MB/s of a modern consumer SSD (and perfectly within reason for a PCI x2 interface).
- Koromix 10y agoConsumer OS I/O software stacks are completely unable to deal with this. It was fine for spinning drive latency, it's okay(ish) for high-performance SSD but the open/read/write model just cannot work that fast. It's several orders of magnitude off. Assuming we keep the file system model, I'm guessing some kind of direct memory mapping is in order? Anyone knows what's ahead of us on the software side, to take advantage of this kind of latency?
- rubber_duck 10y agoWhat's wrong with plain old mmap ?
- Koromix 10y agommap() tricks you into thinking you can directly access the disk. What really happens when you access the mapped data is that the CPU generates a page fault, the OS takes control, copies the data from disk to physical memory and maps the page in your address space. So essentially it is a convient way to do read(). The mmap() model is good. The current page fault mechanism, not so much.
- rayiner 10y agoThe difference is that you only take the page fault once per page (or less than once if you do some prefetching in the kernel), while you have to do a system call for every read().
- baq 10y agoso if you solder this accelerator onto a motherboard and make it a few times larger than your RAM, you get a super-low-latency L5-ish cache (where RAM is L4-ish) and, potentially, an ability to instantenously suspend and keep suspended without consuming any power at all, assuming RAM is mostly in the Optane cache at all times. sounds nice.
- acqq 10y agoIf it still suffers from the limited number of the write cycles, if it's even a few orders of magnitude more it still can't be used instead of RAM, but still just instead of the disk.
- hellabites 10y agoThey claim that it has an unlimited number of write cycles.
- conistonwater 10y agoIs this the same thing as this talk? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXurTRtmfWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXurTRtmfWc
- snorrah 10y agoAh, interesting, it seemed as if it wasn't going to be competing with current ssd's in terms of capacity, but the last part of the article mentions 10x the capacity of nand and so over a terabyte on an M.2 drive. Assuming price might be quite high, it seems like it'll be a full upgrade over nand ssd's.
- gumby 10y agoNo discussion of power in the fluffy article; perhaps there was some in the youtube preso but it's impossible to search or skim that. This would definitely be a game changer if they can really ship it that quickly. It's funny that a SVP talked about notebooks rather than phones or servers, where this could possibly be more effective. That shows where Intel's head is, unfortunately. I wonder how it compares to the memristor, which also has a sub 90 ns switching time and pretty low power. Optane blows that out of the water, if it's not vaporware.
- imtringued 10y agoSSDs consume too much power for phones. That shows that intel doesn't believe in the $15 revenue per phone hype. Unless you are the manufacturer of the entire phone you won't see a worthwile amount of money coming your way.
- Synaesthesia 10y agoModern phones have very fast ssd's. Eg the iPhone 6S and Galaxy S6 have desktop class storage. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-review/7 http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-i...
- kriro 10y agoHow do contracts with laptop producers usually work? Could they ship in consumer hardware by the end of the year if that's the stated availability or does it usually take longer? What are the chances that the Apple flagship (MBP) timing will be synched with this technology will be available (possibly as an option only, no idea if the pricepoint is prohibitive)?
- Lionleaf 10y ago"Supporting filesystems in persistent memory" (2014) https://lwn.net/Articles/610174/ https://lwn.net/Articles/610174/
- ClassyPuff 10y agogjulianm 20 hours ago I'm curious, why do you say that the open/read/write model can't work? I suppose that current software should be optimized to take advantage of better performance, that is what really is.