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The smart thing that Intel is doing is making stuff that they know big cloud providers like AWS etc. will pay crazy amounts for and buy in huge volumes. The "us
by xt00 10y ago
The smart thing that Intel is doing is making stuff that they know big cloud providers like AWS etc. will pay crazy amounts for and buy in huge volumes. The "use it as RAM" is incredibly valuable -- especially to bring down costs for databases. For example, running a database with an allocated 32GB of RAM is pretty expensive per month.. And if somebody like AWS sold a cheaper DB instance version that ran from this drive as its memory (or was smart paged), then that could bring down the cost of allocating huge databases to memory with a performance hit that many people would be willing to take to save the money.
- tankenmate 10y ago64 bit machines (given the right controllers etc) should be able to map the whole 375GB / 750GB directly into the memory space. You'd almost certainly need a kernel driver, similar to the way a graphics card is mapped into the address space but isn't treated as regular RAM. With the right driver you could just mmap() the address space.
- wtallis 10y agoIntel's strategy here is actually to continue using the standard NVMe interface for Optane SSDs, and to offer a hypervisor that does the job of presenting to the guest OS a pool of memory that is backed by a combination of DRAM and 3D XPoint.