4 ms·

Quite a bit of marketing-speak here on the official site, without a lot of technical details. I know the Optane SSD drives are fast -- is this just device-side

by smlacy 10y ago

Quite a bit of marketing-speak here on the official site, without a lot of technical details. I know the Optane SSD drives are fast -- is this just device-side driver software that allows you to virtually expand available "RAM" and mmap it to the SSD? Why just i7 CPUs? Is there a hardware component? "Just download and install the driver..." (Linux?)

AdamJacobMuller 10y ago
Seems like its some i3/i5/i7, only recent ones? Must be some hardware component to it that makes the SSD look like memory to the system, perhaps as another NUMA zone (could you have a huge NUMA zone with no CPU attached?)
- the8472 10y ago
  Maybe the CLWB instruction?
misja111 10y ago
What I understand of it, after skipping through all the marketing speak, is that the Optane Memory functions a cache for your SATA drive. The Optane cache is just a Optane SSD which uses some new and apparently faster 3D Nand technology. And about Linux; somewhere in the PDF with the technical details it states the requirement that your OS has to be 64 bit Windows ..
- wtallis 10y ago
  > "The Optane cache is just a Optane SSD which uses some new and apparently faster 3D Nand technology." Optane products use 3D XPoint memory, which is not 3D NAND flash memory or any other kind of flash memory. It's probably a phase change memory, but Intel won't say so we have to wait for Chipworks to put it under an electron microscope. The Optane Memory product for consumers is entirely centered around the use case of running Intel's SSD caching software for Windows, which requires a Skylake or newer chipset plus boot firmware that will only actually be available for Kaby Lake systems. The hardware feature they're relying on is a disgusting hack that Linux users want to stay far away from (and can, since there are generic caching solutions for Linux that work atop any block device).
bbulkow 10y ago
Some of us have technical details, and put them out during the press event. The fact that Intel is staying high level is annoying, I admit, but they want "the community" to speak up, when you start using these drives. I have tested on these devices, as a datastore for databases, and it has benefits. If you're writing a lot, and/or are very latency sensitive.
Andys 10y ago
Apparently it can present itself as actual system RAM to the host, in a different NUMA segment to the CPU.
wtallis 10y ago
These consumer Optane Memory drives rely on a chipset hardware feature (that was introduced in the last generation) to work with Intel's caching strategy for Windows, which is complicated and ugly partly because it has to work around Windows limitations and partly because it has to enforce their product segmentation strategy. On Linux, it's just a NVMe device that can be used with any pre-existing caching software solution. On the enterprise side, Intel is offering the Memory Drive Technology software that is a minimal hypervisor to present a pool of memory equal to about DRAM+85% of Optane, with the actual allocation managed by the hypervisor and opaque to the guest OS. The hypervisor can run on several generations of Xeon processors.

by smlacy 10y ago

AdamJacobMuller 10y ago

Seems like its some i3/i5/i7, only recent ones? Must be some hardware component to it that makes the SSD look like memory to the system, perhaps as another NUMA zone (could you have a huge NUMA zone with no CPU attached?)

the8472 10y ago
Maybe the CLWB instruction?

misja111 10y ago

What I understand of it, after skipping through all the marketing speak, is that the Optane Memory functions a cache for your SATA drive. The Optane cache is just a Optane SSD which uses some new and apparently faster 3D Nand technology. And about Linux; somewhere in the PDF with the technical details it states the requirement that your OS has to be 64 bit Windows ..

wtallis 10y ago
> "The Optane cache is just a Optane SSD which uses some new and apparently faster 3D Nand technology." Optane products use 3D XPoint memory, which is not 3D NAND flash memory or any other kind of flash memory. It's probably a phase change memory, but Intel won't say so we have to wait for Chipworks to put it under an electron microscope. The Optane Memory product for consumers is entirely centered around the use case of running Intel's SSD caching software for Windows, which requires a Skylake or newer chipset plus boot firmware that will only actually be available for Kaby Lake systems. The hardware feature they're relying on is a disgusting hack that Linux users want to stay far away from (and can, since there are generic caching solutions for Linux that work atop any block device).

bbulkow 10y ago

Some of us have technical details, and put them out during the press event. The fact that Intel is staying high level is annoying, I admit, but they want "the community" to speak up, when you start using these drives. I have tested on these devices, as a datastore for databases, and it has benefits. If you're writing a lot, and/or are very latency sensitive.

Andys 10y ago

Apparently it can present itself as actual system RAM to the host, in a different NUMA segment to the CPU.

wtallis 10y ago

These consumer Optane Memory drives rely on a chipset hardware feature (that was introduced in the last generation) to work with Intel's caching strategy for Windows, which is complicated and ugly partly because it has to work around Windows limitations and partly because it has to enforce their product segmentation strategy. On Linux, it's just a NVMe device that can be used with any pre-existing caching software solution. On the enterprise side, Intel is offering the Memory Drive Technology software that is a minimal hypervisor to present a pool of memory equal to about DRAM+85% of Optane, with the actual allocation managed by the hypervisor and opaque to the guest OS. The hypervisor can run on several generations of Xeon processors.