21 ms·

The end of Optane is bad news

270 points by RachelF 4y ago

mikewarot 4y ago
The very laptop I'm typing this in has 256 GB of Optane memory, I'll never see it's full potential, will I?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  That seems pretty unlikely. Do you mean it has a 256GB SSD with a small amount of Optane memory fronting it, integrated on an NVMe device? 256GB of Optane persistent memory would cost north of $2500.
  - madisp 4y ago
    My desktop has a 480GB Optane disk, it cost around $500 4 years ago. There was a prosumer lineup of almost affordable Optane disks - https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/123626/intel-optane-ssd-900p-series-480gb-12-height-pcie-x4-20nm-3d-xpoint.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/123626/...
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      Yeah but that’s not the byte-addressable looks-exactly-like-DRAM stuff the article is going on about.
      - madisp 4y ago
        what do you mean? the disk only has optane, there's no NAND or anything behind it like some of the lower end Optane SSDs.
        donavanm 4y ago
        Optane is/was sold as pcie/nvme block devices. I use that for durability compared to TLC flash. It was also sold as DRAM format hanging off a memory controller and presented as (magically persistent) pages/bytes to the os/application. Theyre different price points.
vipulb334 4y ago
I'm CYNical. If this is as powerful as mentionED in the article by ʼThe Register', it would be likely adopted by the coMMunity in some form? Saying it's the death of this technology is probably SHOrt-sighted.
- avalys 4y ago
  Huh?
1MachineElf 4y ago
Might have been more successful if it hadn't been burdened by Intel's IP and licensing.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Maybe... I think the bigger problem is that Intel was banking on corporate/commercial customers to buy these cards, and in the end they were only able to trick a few gamers and pro users into buying one. It really begs the question of which workloads are memory/bandwidth constrained, and how does this help them? It reminds me of Apple's impressive memory bandwidth figures for M1 Pro/Max, that were slightly soured when only a scant few real-world tasks fully took advantage of it. We don't really need memory-mapped storage, IMO. If we do, it's perfectly attainable with swap/virtual memory (and pretty damn fast with newer NVME specs). I think Intel found something cool, didn't know how to market it, and ended up placing a bad bet on fairly domain-specific technology.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    Almost all workloads are memory bw constrained, is the problem of our era. That is one of the biggest drivers of M1 perf across the board. Optane is orders of magnitude faster than virtual memory, it is a complete OS bypass. I think you are conflating Optane used in an SSD and Optane on the memory bus. SSD Optane was a way to package and sell it before the rest of the hardware and sofware caught up for DIMM based Optane. edit, removed snark.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      > Almost all workloads are memory bw constrained, is the problem of our era. Well, sure; I think that sentiment applies to networking/CPU maximization too. But, much like we discovered with SSDs, there is a point of diminishing return for most people. Pretty much anything running an NVMe SSD won't experience significant storage throttling. Anyone connected to wired broadband will have roughly the same experience as everyone else on it. Since so much software is designed around nominal specifications, I don't really notice the M1's memory bandwidth in regular use. Text editing, app launching, smoothness and usability... it's all roughly the same as my throwaway $300 Thinkpad that has a nicer keyboard and no ARM contrivances. > Optane is orders of magnitude faster than virtual memory Not really... Intel has only claimed that Optane is 3-4 times faster than flash-based NVMe, which still puts it at >10x slower than the speeds of a trashy DDR4 2133mHz DIMM. If it's supposed to replace memory, it's both slower and more expensive. If it's intended to be a storage volume, most people would probably get better performance out of a ramfs or tempfs.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
The "we can't figure out how to change Linux to use only primary storage" is real. I realized not too long ago that the biggest thing holding back the advancement of computing is software developers. They can't imagine novel ideas. Try to explain to a developer that dependency hell only exists at all because their own software/compilers/programming languages aren't tracking dependencies within their own application's functions, and they look at you like a dog looking at a human in a dog costume. (Most of them also think YAML is a configuration format and don't know what SDLC stands for, so I guess the dependency thing is way out there)
- Retr0id 4y ago
  Could you expand on why you think that solves dependency hell? It sounds like you're describing tree-shaking, which is already commonplace, particularly in the JS ecosystem. Or LTO dead-code elimination, in compiled languages - neither of which solve dependency hell.
  - 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    Dependency hell happens when code is subject to an external dependency. Within an application, you can determine which of your functions calls some other version of a function/dependency, can remove code, add code, etc. But you can't do that to other applications; you only control your own application's code and what it depends on/is built against/tested against. So every application is effectively locked into what it's view of the world is, and it just has to hope that never deviates, and that every system it runs on is set up exactly the same. You can play fast and loose with your code by trying to keep the same API/ABI as your underlying code changes, but subtle differences will eventually cause bugs/regressions when expected behaviors change. The way to solve the problem of dependency hell is to version every function, and only call functions based on their versions, and ship every old version of every function. Then the application itself, or a dynamic linker, must find and execute the correct version of the function it needs to call. In this way, dependencies can change at any time, but every line of code will only ever call functions that they were originally built and tested against, because those versions are still knocking around somewhere in the dependency. You can upgrade a dependency 50 times but your application will still just keep calling the old version of the dependency's function, and so the behavior of your application remains the same while the dependency receives upgraded functions. You can upgrade any application at any time and it will just pull in the latest dependency, and continue to call the versions of that dependency that they need. The basic concept for this already exists in glibc as you can ship version-specific functions and link/call a version-specific function. But literally no one uses it. To get widespread adoption and make the paradigm implicit/automatic, we would need to modify the programming language, the compiler, the way programs are executed, require lots more storage, probably new paradigms of caching and layering and shipping code. Package deps would become metadata in a build process, package management would become "scan all executables for dependent versions & download them all". Nix OS is an attempt to work around all of this by pretending that the problem is just with the linker or the file tree or PATH or something. But it's simply impossible to resolve dependency hell entirely without versioned functions, due to rare but intractable intra-package dependency conflicts. And it doesn't address data model versions or network service interface version changes. Containers are an attempt to work around all of this by literally having a different copy of the world for every containerized application. It works well enough, except again the boundary between containers is subject to application interface versions and data model versions changing. (The data model and code are basically the same thing since you need code to do anything with data) The only way to have dependency-hell-free containerized applications is if you version their interfaces/data models and have them call the correct version for other containerized apps [or network services], so again you're back to versions of functions.
jeffbee 4y ago
This is a very silly analysis. Lots of smart people took a good, hard look at 3DXP and it just never made economic sense. On top of the cost of the modules, and the cost of the high-spec processor that can use it, it also comes with the opportunity cost of not getting to use a DIMM slot for DRAM. It wasn't the failure of the industry to imagine a better future, it was the failure of the product to make economic sense.
- pinewurst 4y ago
  A lot of this was Intel’s own misbegotten attempt to force the use of higher profit processor SKUs which were the only ones allowing enough memory slots/address space to be useful. Also the Optane interface is incredibly complex with lots of funny tradeoffs having more to do with imposed market segmentation than technology. I can’t comment on 3DXP cost effectiveness but it was always funny how Intel ducked admitting the use of Ovshinsky IP.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    MBAs eating the world.
dzdt 4y ago
Optane by itself wasn't a product that acted as a solution to real-world problems. It needed to be incorporated into a larger stack.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Persistent memory though is a solution to a very common problem. Especially for anything distributed you want that metadata to be super fast but also durable.
- Shorel 4y ago
  It needed a database engine to take advantage of it.
deckard1 4y ago
> How do you find a program to run if there are no directories? How do you save stuff, if there's nowhere to save it to? How do you compile code, when there is no way to #include one file into another because there are no files, and where does the resulting binary go? The term for this is orthogonal persistence. Lots of people have thought about this before. In terms of Lisp OSes, Squeak (Smalltalk), and the long-dead TUNES project[1]. You don't need special memory to do this, but I imagine it could help. There actually is a modern mainstream OS that does this already. It's called iOS. No, I'm not joking. It effectively provides the illusion of persisted state which is good enough for the user to believe it. No more saving files. Apps just do it. Automatically. Android does the same. Both also provide the illusion of always-on apps. You click a button and apps, typically, load so fast you don't notice they are loading from RAM or flash storage. It's incredibly seamless and precisely what people had in mind 20 years ago. [1] http://tunes.org/cliki/orthogonal_20persistence.html http://tunes.org/cliki/orthogonal_20persistence.html
- icodestuff 4y ago
  Developers don't see that though. It only looks like that on iOS to users. Behind the scenes, apps are still written using files. Hell, Apple eventually had to add its own "Files" app because storing things and finding them again was getting complicated.
- duskwuff 4y ago
  Another OS that did something like this, IIRC, was early versions of PalmOS. There was literally no distinction between storage and memory -- everything was stored in battery-backed RAM (except the OS, which was in ROM).
  - zootboy 4y ago
    It was the same deal with some Windows Mobile 2003 (and presumably other) devices. Except it was Windows, so of course it had to have a weird interface. There was a slider in the control panel that let you change the allocation of RAM between "memory" and "storage". But the system would auto-adjust this allocation, so the slider's effect was temporary. It was quite strange. See the first screenshot on this page: https://www.pocketpcfaq.com/faqs/5.0/memory_management.htm https://www.pocketpcfaq.com/faqs/5.0/memory_management.htm
sitkack 4y ago
Optane is magical and was mismanaged by both Micron and Intel. The article doesn't really express what we have lost. The DIMMs were expensive and didn't have broad compatibility. They should have made them in a regular DDR3/4/5 format and half the cost of main memory, or 2x to 4x the density for the same price. The density roadmap had them doubling in capacity with each generation. 1TB per DIMM slot. The Register is right in that it was the newest thing to come along in 50 years. Reliability, performance, flexibility, all could have made huge strides under PMEM/Optane architectures. Intel thought it had a golden goose (it did) and that the top profit margin enterprise workloads would flock to it. Intel has everything it needs to succeed except for internal politics. But that is true of all large corpse these days. FPGA fabric built into the Optane DIMM would have been magic.
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  "corpse" - vs "corps" - kinda funny if it was intentional; maybe funnier if it wasn't
  - sitkack 4y ago
    I saw the typo, chuckled and left it in.
  - brnt 4y ago
    I mean, corpses do have everything in them to succeed; their cells just can't agree on a actually doing that anymore.
    - civilitty 4y ago
      Not to be pedantic but most corpses alive today don't have anything resembling cell walls let alone cells.
      - MereInterest 4y ago
        To be pedantic, most corpses aren't alive today.
threeseed 4y ago
I wonder how much of this is to do with cloud support. AWS has never supported it. And on Azure/GCP it was only on expensive, high end types designed for SAP HANA and other niche use cases. Shame as there was some interesting projects e.g. DAOS [1] that I would have loved to try out. [1] https://docs.daos.io/v2.0/ https://docs.daos.io/v2.0/
skunkworker 4y ago
I was really looking forward to using optane as an ARC and database cache, along with a boot drive.
- donavanm 4y ago
  The “cheap” optane nvme devices work great as ARC and or Zil. I also use one as temp storage for streaming nvr data and post processing. Id buy another today for the durability properties alone.
dataflow 4y ago
I under understood what problem single-level storage was actually supposed to solve. In the real world you still need a notion of startup and shutdown because programs crash, memory gets corrupted, things get screwed up, hardware changes, etc., so it's not like we were going to avoid those. So, from a technical standpoint, why exactly would I want to merge my RAM with my SSD? The only thing I can think of is that it lets you achieve genuine "zero-copy" usage of data. Which, I mean, is cool. But is the overhead of copying read-only data from secondary storage to RAM really such a big problem for >90% of users to be justification for changing everyone's very notion of computing?
- threeseed 4y ago
  > But is the overhead of copying read-only data from secondary storage to RAM really such a big problem It's not a problem that will affect every developer but it is a critical problem. Many uses cases need access to data in both a fast (~ memory) and durable (~ SSD) way. Copying data from SSD to memory helps with performance but the minute you modify that data then you've lost durability. Databases, file systems, caches etc are examples of critical use cases that are used by all developers that would benefit from something like Optane.
  - dataflow 4y ago
    What percentage (say) speed improvement would you expect for typical workloads on database, file systems, etc. from a unified memory system?
    - threeseed 4y ago
      So there are only a few examples of existing systems being re-written for Optane. There was Redis [1] which was around ~10% slower than the memory only version but gained you durability. And there was an implementation of Spark Shuffle [2] which was 1.3x - 3.2x faster but that isn't really stressing I/O as much as other use cases. For a filesystem you can store the entire metadata in Optane so EXISTS/LIST type operations and anything involving a bloom filter would see the full benefit e.g. order of magnitude better than NVME. [1] https://github.com/pmem/pmem-redis https://github.com/pmem/pmem-redis [2] https://databricks.com/session_na20/accelerating-apache-spark-shuffle-for-data-analytics-on-the-cloud-with-remote-persistent-memory-pools https://databricks.com/session_na20/accelerating-apache-spar...
tns-hn 4y ago
I think Intel killing Optane the way it did is premature it does make some sense in the long run. If CXL takes of the best parts of optane will live on in an industry wide standard. However I am having a hard time understanding the nuances between different CXL versions and implementations so it might end up as an example for the famous XKCD standards post. I was under the impression that optane was just starting to gain a bit more traction with major players like VMware acknowledging persistent memory through project capitola. Let's hope that Intel axe-ing Optane opens a door for industry supported pmem so that AMD systems can also benefit from it.
dang 4y ago
Related: Why Intel killed its Optane memory business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32272648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32272648 - July 2022 (6 comments) Intel to Wind Down Optane Memory Business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270799 - July 2022 (6 comments) Intel Kills Optane Memory Business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270584 - July 2022 (1 comment)
3np 4y ago
> Optane kit is as big and as cheap as disk drive Wait what? It's always been at a significant premium per GB over both enterprise HDDs and high-speed SSDs. The cheapest DIMM module is 128GB for > $450 a pop. Even in the enterprise range you'll get 1TB of fast and durable SSD with PLP for that, and that's when I restrict myself to things that are in stock right now. Even if you would get the Optanes at 75% off, that'd still almost be twice the price. There's never been a point in the past when they've been significantly cheaper, either.
- lproven 4y ago
  Yes, OK, I will own up to that. It was poorly phrased. "Cheaper than RAM, but in the size range of SSDs, with performance in between the two," would have been a better way to express it.
truth_seeker 4y ago
In contrast, I would say new growing advancement of DDR, PCIE and SSD to handle more data rates for ingestion and retrieval while also being more power efficient is pretty good news.
ncmncm 4y ago
There is an OS in current use that could have used Optane directly. It used to be OS/400 on an IBM machine called AS/400. Now the machine is an "i-series", and I think emulated on a POWER machine. Under OS/400, throughout the life of the machine, malloc will never return the same address twice. If you have an address (128 bits), you can see the last thing written there, in perpetuity. And, a program started up will run until it dies. Shut down, start up again, and the programs only notice time passed. If you get a new computer, you shut the old one down and start its image on the new hardware, and again the programs don't notice. Amusingly, much of the OS was coded in pre-1990 C++, basically Java without the GC.
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] Yes, and the FOSDEM talk that the article is partly based on mentioned that. I linked it from within this article.
- meragrin_ 4y ago
  > coded in pre-1990 C++, basically Java without the GC. How do you get "basically Java without the GC" from "pre-1990 C++"?
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    From the language definitions. 1995 Java was, roughly, 1990 C++ with GC stuck on. It was not a thing of beauty. Its designers had absolutely no desire to code in it, themselves.
jandrewrogers 4y ago
Few people have a problem that Optane directly solves. Its utility is narrow in the best case and you would need to specifically engineer a software stack to take advantage of it for some small part of the memory address space. In many cases it is desirable for memory to be volatile. If high-throughput paging mechanics are required, like databases, this technology doesn't serve much of a purpose. Storage densities per server have only been increasing. It has some obvious utility for transaction logs and such but falls into a notorious dead spot in the market -- people with low volumes don't need the performance and people with high volumes can achieve similar results by other means for a price that isn't that different from the Optane premium. I've tried to find a use for it, and I haven't been able to. That doesn't mean a use case doesn't exist, but if it was "the biggest new idea" you'd think the use case would be more obvious for more applications.
- zogomoox 4y ago
  The use case is replacing flash, because modern flash cells die after a handful of writes. Surely there's a market for ultra-durable SSDs.
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    That math rarely pencils out. Most companies with large storage budgets have figured out that you can design write-intensive storage engines for cheap read-optimized flash that will last several years without an issue despite the relatively low number of write cycles. This is easy to verify on a cocktail napkin if one can assume the software is efficient with its use of storage bandwidth. In most applications with sane storage architectures, you might physically rewrite an SSD once a month, and often less, despite relatively high write intensity. Quite a lot of software is excessively wasteful with storage writes, in which case it is more of an issue. That says more about the software than the storage, and can be addressed by not being profligate.
    - anonymousDan 4y ago
      What do you mean by 'wasteful' with storage writes? That there is some unintentional write amplification going on for whatever reason?
siddontang 4y ago
Very sad to hear this news, but not so unexpected. As a distributed database engineer, we have been working with some universities and exploring the optimization of database on Intel Optane for a long time, and even have published some papers. But everything was only in the experimental stage, it was difficult for us to use the research successfully in production, because nearly all of of our customers hadn't bought Intel Optane. They thought Optane was too expensive and didn't find suitable scenarios. As far as I know, the only successful story was from one of our customer, he used Optane for Redis which had an acceptable latency and better cost-effective. Things go worse when the cloud is raising. We find that we can't use Optane on the cloud, so our later priority is to explore the optimization on the cloud disk like EBS GP3, etc.
tgv 4y ago
About the revolutionary aspect of it: primary memory instead of files. Suppose we overcome the problems mentioned in the article, then it still doesn't do anything for current software for normal tasks. E.g., how do you back up primary memory? The only way would be for the application that owns the memory to do it. How do you share files between two processes? By adding memory sharing into your application. So, many of the tasks that are normally taken care of by the OS would need to move into your application. That's not feasible. So it needs a rather different OS and run-time environment, which don't exist, plus a huge rewrite of your apps, along the services it needs, before it can be even considered. But not only that: it doesn't solve a problem big enough to make it commercially viable. It might be nice for something like Amazon's Redshift, but not for our mundane web servers and accounting programs, nor for the apps on our laptops and telephones. It's a solution in search for a problem.
pella 4y ago
~ alternative: "Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, today announced the launch of the second generation of XL-FLASH, a Storage Class Memory (SCM) solution based on its BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology, which significantly reduces bit cost while providing high performance and low latency. Product sample shipments are scheduled to start in November this year, with volume production expected to begin in 2023. The second generation XL-FLASH achieves significant reduction in bit cost as a result of the addition of new multi-level cell (MLC) functionality with 2-bit per cell, in addition to the single-level cell (SLC) of the existing model. The maximum number of planes that can operate simultaneously has also increased from the current model, which will allow for improved throughput. The new XL-FLASH will have a memory capacity of 256 gigabits. Kioxia's second generation XL-FLASH memory solution is engineered to bring higher performance and lower cost for data centers and enterprise servers and storage systems. In the future, it may also be possible to apply the product using CXL (Compute Express Link). Kioxia will continue to develop cutting-edge technologies and products to meet the needs of the expanding SCM market. Kioxia will feature the second generation XL-FLASH during its keynote presentation at the Flash Memory Summit 2022 in Santa Clara, California on August 2. " https://www.techpowerup.com/297385/kioxia-launches-second-generation-of-high-performance-cost-effective-xl-flash-storage-class-memory-solution https://www.techpowerup.com/297385/kioxia-launches-second-ge...
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  XL-FLASH is in the 10us latency range? That's competitive with Optane over NVMe but I wouldn't really call it an alternative to the DIMMs that could do 0.3us. I'm definitely curious about how fast it will run over CXL.
  - pella 4y ago
    > XL-FLASH is in the 10us latency range? we will get more information in the next 24h "Kioxia will feature the second generation XL-FLASH™ during its keynote presentation at the Flash Memory Summit 2022 in Santa Clara, California on August 2." !
pella 4y ago
~ alternative: "Last week Intel killed Optane. Today, Kioxia and Everspin announced comparable tech" "Rumors of storage-class memory's demise may have been premature" https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/02/kioxia_everspin_persistent_memory/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/02/kioxia_everspin_persi...
transfire 4y ago
Any hope they will license the tech or pivot and offer it under a different brand and marketing approach? I was very interested in the tech but never quite understood how to utilize it, so it dropped off my radar.
dusted 4y ago
I always wondered what it'd have looked like if Optane had a frontend of regular memory (infinitely re-writable) and just had a special command to "sync" it back to persistent memory.. then the OS wouldn't need to be made aware, except for the special sync option once every while to persist..
- hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 4y ago
eternityforest 4y ago
SSDs are already insanely fast, and the file model has served us well enough. It makes persistence explicit. Considering that rebooting is currently the primary way of fixing any malfunctioning device, blurring RAM and disk doesn't seem that helpful. Things will crash and you will still need that distinction to some degree, no matter what the storage tech is. Some stuff is volatile and some stuff isn't. We still need to explicitly define what happens when we reboot. What makes optane really interesting to me is the endurance. They seem like they would be great as traditional SSDs hosting databases.
- branko_d 4y ago
  Not just “traditional SSDs”, which are block-addressable. A byte-addressable Optane RAM would enable a database that no longer “thinks” in pages, but can independently persist much smaller pieces of its internal structures, possibly leading to new paradigms compared to what we have now. Perhaps write-ahead logs, B-Trees and other stuff can be implemented better when you are no longer limited to writing entire pages?
- tester756 4y ago
  AFAIK they were used for databases
rasz 4y ago
>Optane presented a radical, transformative technology but because of this legacy view, this technical debt, few in the industry realized just how radical Optane was. And so it bombed. No. It bombed because Intel is not in a habit of reducing prices. Why optimize production and sell more instead of milking top 1% of your corporate clients? P4800X was introduced in 2017 at $1.5K 375GB, guess how much cheaper its now :)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ianai 4y ago
This is definitely a case where hardware surpassed software in that classic “debate”. Intel probably needed to do a reference implementation in Windows/Linux for it to gain teeth though.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  Indeed. Sometimes the "build it and they'll come" doesn't work at all. It Itanium had excellent Linux support on day one it could have been a different story. To this day I complain loudly IBM has no entry-level desktop/deskside POWER machines that are appealing to people who would buy a generic x86 workstation. If all they have is hardware for current clients to upgrade to, the platform becomes legacy pretty quickly. I will go as far as saying ARM servers would never have happened were it not for pioneering stuff like the Raspberry Pi and other small hobbyist boards that served as an entry level and proved ARM was viable as a Linux host.
- powerhour 4y ago
  Making a version affordable and available to small time randos would probably have helped as well. Was it even possible to buy a complete system at something other than call-for-pricing pricing?
rbanffy 4y ago
Just to be picky, if I remember it correctly, IBM's AS/400 (and its descendants, IBM i) were based on the idea of all storage being directly addressable by the CPU. When I say AS/400 was ahead of its time and, in some aspects, ahead of ours, I am not entirely joking.
blockarchitech 4y ago
Optane was very cool, but at the same time it quickly turned into a very niche product. If I'm not mistaken, once of the primary purposes was to accelerate spinning disk drives. However, I really don't think that's needed nowadays as hard drives aren't really that horrible now and SSDs are getting cheaper and cheaper every year. I think if Intel really focused on what they were trying to do, I really do think they would have had success in the data center for accelerating data center drives.
teleforce 4y ago
This is by far the most informative article coming from The Register, I'd had expected this article coming from AnandTech or similar news outlets. Back in last year 2021, Linus was asked what is the most special about Linux in an interview, and he pointed to the Linux File System as the fastest in the business [1]. Now imagine an OS (Linux or not) having a first class in-memory file system, and it will blows away any conventional OS file-system, and Optane can provide this possibility at an affordable cost. I know that you can get several Terabytes of RAM with Xeon CPUs now, but at the moment the cost will be prohibitive. The above mentioned feature has a killer application namely non-linear time-frequency analysis [2]. This quadratic complexity algorithm need to have huge amount of working memory in order to work effectively. I have a paper on this topic applied to biomedical field and it is currently trending on top of the page in Google search for several years now due to the highest accuracy, specificity and sensitivity of more than 99%. Apparently it's a sleeper paper because other researchers would avoid citing the article due to its very high accuracy using commonly available datasets hence lower ranking (still high but not top or front page) on the subject in Google Scholar search. During a meeting with Micron engineers earlier this year I have conveyed my condolence to them. [1]https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and-git https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_time%E2%80%93frequency_distribution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_time%E2%80%93freque...
- lproven 4y ago
  > This is by far the most informative article coming from The Register, I'd had expected this article coming from AnandTech or similar news outlets. Thank you. :-) I am trying to do some more in-depth analytical pieces for the site, and I am delighted that several of them have done very well -- not only on HN.
- twoodfin 4y ago
  The second part of your comment hints at the trouble with your first: Optane didn’t provide major benefits over existing storage architectures when used for a block-addressable file system. It had significant density benefits when used as RAM, but at an equally significant latency penalty. To really see wins, you needed an application data model that could benefit from the high density/single node capacity, byte-addressability, and persistence. Basically an in-memory database, either general purpose or embedded in a specialized data processing application. Those are premium, niche markets, and could never support the demand Intel needed to make commercial sense.
AuthorizedCust 4y ago
The article makes a case, to me at least, that Unix’s “everything is a file” mindset may be increasingly a liability.
- lproven 4y ago
  [Author here] Yes, that's exactly right. The mindset was apt when RAM was tiny and expensive, and the only way to get large amounts of space was disks. That is no longer true.
mastax 4y ago
I'm really sad to see optane go. Byte-addressable, high-endurance, consistent low latency. It was the platonic ideal of solid state storage. But flash is more than good enough and it's cheap. Even pretty good quality NVMe drives are approaching $100/2TB.
marcodiego 4y ago
What I really want: a connector that allows me to put DDR3 modules on a SATA port and use it as a swap partition.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- replygirl 4y ago
  please ewaste the old ram honey, the kids are getting too old to share a bedroom
- awiesenhofer 4y ago
  I remember some 10+ years ago there were pcie cards you could stick ddr2 modules into - but i can't seem to find a modern equivalent... Edit: found the old one though, Gigabyte i-RAM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM
  - marcodiego 4y ago
    I'd love to have a simple DDR3 to SATA connector and get cheap upgrades for my laptop.
ribit 4y ago
Optane was a very interesting technology but I don't think it as revolutionary as the article makes it to be. First, Optane does not make the memory hierarchy simpler as you still need fast RAM to solve the write endurance problem. Second, it is not obvious that Optane would be cost-competitive with SSDs. Third, you don't need a tech like that to implement a persistent memory system like one described in the article: just use RAM backed by an SSD and a battery/capacitor to flush the dirty pages in an event of power failure. I think Apple does something like this in their newer devices. This indeed leaves Optane as a limited-use enterprise persistent cache technology.
perlgeek 4y ago
> But Intel made it work, produced this stuff, put it on the market… and not enough people were interested, and now it is giving up, too. That sounds like a dubious claim to me, at least if we take the hyping up at face value. If Optane was really that awesome, why not build a database on top that's either much faster or much cheaper than what we have now? Then sell that to a cloud vendor. The end user is only interested in the wire protocol (and up the stack from there) that they speak to the database, and not the underlying OS. I cannot imagine Intel going to one of the three major cloud vendors, offering a 10x improvement (in either cost or performance) for one of their larger offerings, and the cloud vendor simply saying "nope, not interested". Maybe the practical improvements simply weren't there?
nvmefs 4y ago
Any chance DAOS will survive? https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/high-performance-computing/daos.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/high-performance-com... https://docs.daos.io/v2.0 https://docs.daos.io/v2.0 https://github.com/daos-stack/daos https://github.com/daos-stack/daos
touisteur 4y ago
This doesn't give me great hopes for Processing In Memory... Either they get full compatibility with existing DRAM at same performance, or they won't see mass adoption.
ajolly 4y ago
I love my optane drives. One of the biggest quality of life upgrades for my desktop.

270 points by RachelF 4y ago

mikewarot 4y ago

The very laptop I'm typing this in has 256 GB of Optane memory, I'll never see it's full potential, will I?

jeffbee 4y ago
That seems pretty unlikely. Do you mean it has a 256GB SSD with a small amount of Optane memory fronting it, integrated on an NVMe device? 256GB of Optane persistent memory would cost north of $2500.
- madisp 4y ago
  My desktop has a 480GB Optane disk, it cost around $500 4 years ago. There was a prosumer lineup of almost affordable Optane disks - https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/123626/intel-optane-ssd-900p-series-480gb-12-height-pcie-x4-20nm-3d-xpoint.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/123626/...
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Yeah but that’s not the byte-addressable looks-exactly-like-DRAM stuff the article is going on about.
    - madisp 4y ago
      what do you mean? the disk only has optane, there's no NAND or anything behind it like some of the lower end Optane SSDs.
      - donavanm 4y ago
        Optane is/was sold as pcie/nvme block devices. I use that for durability compared to TLC flash. It was also sold as DRAM format hanging off a memory controller and presented as (magically persistent) pages/bytes to the os/application. Theyre different price points.

vipulb334 4y ago

I'm CYNical. If this is as powerful as mentionED in the article by ʼThe Register', it would be likely adopted by the coMMunity in some form? Saying it's the death of this technology is probably SHOrt-sighted.

avalys 4y ago
Huh?

1MachineElf 4y ago

Might have been more successful if it hadn't been burdened by Intel's IP and licensing.

smoldesu 4y ago
Maybe... I think the bigger problem is that Intel was banking on corporate/commercial customers to buy these cards, and in the end they were only able to trick a few gamers and pro users into buying one. It really begs the question of which workloads are memory/bandwidth constrained, and how does this help them? It reminds me of Apple's impressive memory bandwidth figures for M1 Pro/Max, that were slightly soured when only a scant few real-world tasks fully took advantage of it. We don't really need memory-mapped storage, IMO. If we do, it's perfectly attainable with swap/virtual memory (and pretty damn fast with newer NVME specs). I think Intel found something cool, didn't know how to market it, and ended up placing a bad bet on fairly domain-specific technology.
- sitkack 4y ago
  Almost all workloads are memory bw constrained, is the problem of our era. That is one of the biggest drivers of M1 perf across the board. Optane is orders of magnitude faster than virtual memory, it is a complete OS bypass. I think you are conflating Optane used in an SSD and Optane on the memory bus. SSD Optane was a way to package and sell it before the rest of the hardware and sofware caught up for DIMM based Optane. edit, removed snark.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    > Almost all workloads are memory bw constrained, is the problem of our era. Well, sure; I think that sentiment applies to networking/CPU maximization too. But, much like we discovered with SSDs, there is a point of diminishing return for most people. Pretty much anything running an NVMe SSD won't experience significant storage throttling. Anyone connected to wired broadband will have roughly the same experience as everyone else on it. Since so much software is designed around nominal specifications, I don't really notice the M1's memory bandwidth in regular use. Text editing, app launching, smoothness and usability... it's all roughly the same as my throwaway $300 Thinkpad that has a nicer keyboard and no ARM contrivances. > Optane is orders of magnitude faster than virtual memory Not really... Intel has only claimed that Optane is 3-4 times faster than flash-based NVMe, which still puts it at >10x slower than the speeds of a trashy DDR4 2133mHz DIMM. If it's supposed to replace memory, it's both slower and more expensive. If it's intended to be a storage volume, most people would probably get better performance out of a ramfs or tempfs.

0xbadcafebee 4y ago

The "we can't figure out how to change Linux to use only primary storage" is real. I realized not too long ago that the biggest thing holding back the advancement of computing is software developers. They can't imagine novel ideas. Try to explain to a developer that dependency hell only exists at all because their own software/compilers/programming languages aren't tracking dependencies within their own application's functions, and they look at you like a dog looking at a human in a dog costume. (Most of them also think YAML is a configuration format and don't know what SDLC stands for, so I guess the dependency thing is way out there)

Retr0id 4y ago
Could you expand on why you think that solves dependency hell? It sounds like you're describing tree-shaking, which is already commonplace, particularly in the JS ecosystem. Or LTO dead-code elimination, in compiled languages - neither of which solve dependency hell.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  Dependency hell happens when code is subject to an external dependency. Within an application, you can determine which of your functions calls some other version of a function/dependency, can remove code, add code, etc. But you can't do that to other applications; you only control your own application's code and what it depends on/is built against/tested against. So every application is effectively locked into what it's view of the world is, and it just has to hope that never deviates, and that every system it runs on is set up exactly the same. You can play fast and loose with your code by trying to keep the same API/ABI as your underlying code changes, but subtle differences will eventually cause bugs/regressions when expected behaviors change. The way to solve the problem of dependency hell is to version every function, and only call functions based on their versions, and ship every old version of every function. Then the application itself, or a dynamic linker, must find and execute the correct version of the function it needs to call. In this way, dependencies can change at any time, but every line of code will only ever call functions that they were originally built and tested against, because those versions are still knocking around somewhere in the dependency. You can upgrade a dependency 50 times but your application will still just keep calling the old version of the dependency's function, and so the behavior of your application remains the same while the dependency receives upgraded functions. You can upgrade any application at any time and it will just pull in the latest dependency, and continue to call the versions of that dependency that they need. The basic concept for this already exists in glibc as you can ship version-specific functions and link/call a version-specific function. But literally no one uses it. To get widespread adoption and make the paradigm implicit/automatic, we would need to modify the programming language, the compiler, the way programs are executed, require lots more storage, probably new paradigms of caching and layering and shipping code. Package deps would become metadata in a build process, package management would become "scan all executables for dependent versions & download them all". Nix OS is an attempt to work around all of this by pretending that the problem is just with the linker or the file tree or PATH or something. But it's simply impossible to resolve dependency hell entirely without versioned functions, due to rare but intractable intra-package dependency conflicts. And it doesn't address data model versions or network service interface version changes. Containers are an attempt to work around all of this by literally having a different copy of the world for every containerized application. It works well enough, except again the boundary between containers is subject to application interface versions and data model versions changing. (The data model and code are basically the same thing since you need code to do anything with data) The only way to have dependency-hell-free containerized applications is if you version their interfaces/data models and have them call the correct version for other containerized apps [or network services], so again you're back to versions of functions.

jeffbee 4y ago

This is a very silly analysis. Lots of smart people took a good, hard look at 3DXP and it just never made economic sense. On top of the cost of the modules, and the cost of the high-spec processor that can use it, it also comes with the opportunity cost of not getting to use a DIMM slot for DRAM. It wasn't the failure of the industry to imagine a better future, it was the failure of the product to make economic sense.

pinewurst 4y ago
A lot of this was Intel’s own misbegotten attempt to force the use of higher profit processor SKUs which were the only ones allowing enough memory slots/address space to be useful. Also the Optane interface is incredibly complex with lots of funny tradeoffs having more to do with imposed market segmentation than technology. I can’t comment on 3DXP cost effectiveness but it was always funny how Intel ducked admitting the use of Ovshinsky IP.
- dboreham 4y ago
  MBAs eating the world.

dzdt 4y ago

Optane by itself wasn't a product that acted as a solution to real-world problems. It needed to be incorporated into a larger stack.

threeseed 4y ago
Persistent memory though is a solution to a very common problem. Especially for anything distributed you want that metadata to be super fast but also durable.
Shorel 4y ago
It needed a database engine to take advantage of it.

deckard1 4y ago

> How do you find a program to run if there are no directories? How do you save stuff, if there's nowhere to save it to? How do you compile code, when there is no way to #include one file into another because there are no files, and where does the resulting binary go? The term for this is orthogonal persistence. Lots of people have thought about this before. In terms of Lisp OSes, Squeak (Smalltalk), and the long-dead TUNES project[1]. You don't need special memory to do this, but I imagine it could help. There actually is a modern mainstream OS that does this already. It's called iOS. No, I'm not joking. It effectively provides the illusion of persisted state which is good enough for the user to believe it. No more saving files. Apps just do it. Automatically. Android does the same. Both also provide the illusion of always-on apps. You click a button and apps, typically, load so fast you don't notice they are loading from RAM or flash storage. It's incredibly seamless and precisely what people had in mind 20 years ago. [1] http://tunes.org/cliki/orthogonal_20persistence.html http://tunes.org/cliki/orthogonal_20persistence.html

icodestuff 4y ago
Developers don't see that though. It only looks like that on iOS to users. Behind the scenes, apps are still written using files. Hell, Apple eventually had to add its own "Files" app because storing things and finding them again was getting complicated.
duskwuff 4y ago
Another OS that did something like this, IIRC, was early versions of PalmOS. There was literally no distinction between storage and memory -- everything was stored in battery-backed RAM (except the OS, which was in ROM).
- zootboy 4y ago
  It was the same deal with some Windows Mobile 2003 (and presumably other) devices. Except it was Windows, so of course it had to have a weird interface. There was a slider in the control panel that let you change the allocation of RAM between "memory" and "storage". But the system would auto-adjust this allocation, so the slider's effect was temporary. It was quite strange. See the first screenshot on this page: https://www.pocketpcfaq.com/faqs/5.0/memory_management.htm https://www.pocketpcfaq.com/faqs/5.0/memory_management.htm

sitkack 4y ago

Optane is magical and was mismanaged by both Micron and Intel. The article doesn't really express what we have lost. The DIMMs were expensive and didn't have broad compatibility. They should have made them in a regular DDR3/4/5 format and half the cost of main memory, or 2x to 4x the density for the same price. The density roadmap had them doubling in capacity with each generation. 1TB per DIMM slot. The Register is right in that it was the newest thing to come along in 50 years. Reliability, performance, flexibility, all could have made huge strides under PMEM/Optane architectures. Intel thought it had a golden goose (it did) and that the top profit margin enterprise workloads would flock to it. Intel has everything it needs to succeed except for internal politics. But that is true of all large corpse these days. FPGA fabric built into the Optane DIMM would have been magic.

chrisweekly 4y ago
"corpse" - vs "corps" - kinda funny if it was intentional; maybe funnier if it wasn't
- sitkack 4y ago
  I saw the typo, chuckled and left it in.
- brnt 4y ago
  I mean, corpses do have everything in them to succeed; their cells just can't agree on a actually doing that anymore.
  - civilitty 4y ago
    Not to be pedantic but most corpses alive today don't have anything resembling cell walls let alone cells.
    - MereInterest 4y ago
      To be pedantic, most corpses aren't alive today.

threeseed 4y ago

I wonder how much of this is to do with cloud support. AWS has never supported it. And on Azure/GCP it was only on expensive, high end types designed for SAP HANA and other niche use cases. Shame as there was some interesting projects e.g. DAOS [1] that I would have loved to try out. [1] https://docs.daos.io/v2.0/ https://docs.daos.io/v2.0/

skunkworker 4y ago

I was really looking forward to using optane as an ARC and database cache, along with a boot drive.

donavanm 4y ago
The “cheap” optane nvme devices work great as ARC and or Zil. I also use one as temp storage for streaming nvr data and post processing. Id buy another today for the durability properties alone.

dataflow 4y ago

I under understood what problem single-level storage was actually supposed to solve. In the real world you still need a notion of startup and shutdown because programs crash, memory gets corrupted, things get screwed up, hardware changes, etc., so it's not like we were going to avoid those. So, from a technical standpoint, why exactly would I want to merge my RAM with my SSD? The only thing I can think of is that it lets you achieve genuine "zero-copy" usage of data. Which, I mean, is cool. But is the overhead of copying read-only data from secondary storage to RAM really such a big problem for >90% of users to be justification for changing everyone's very notion of computing?

threeseed 4y ago
> But is the overhead of copying read-only data from secondary storage to RAM really such a big problem It's not a problem that will affect every developer but it is a critical problem. Many uses cases need access to data in both a fast (~ memory) and durable (~ SSD) way. Copying data from SSD to memory helps with performance but the minute you modify that data then you've lost durability. Databases, file systems, caches etc are examples of critical use cases that are used by all developers that would benefit from something like Optane.
- dataflow 4y ago
  What percentage (say) speed improvement would you expect for typical workloads on database, file systems, etc. from a unified memory system?
  - threeseed 4y ago
    So there are only a few examples of existing systems being re-written for Optane. There was Redis [1] which was around ~10% slower than the memory only version but gained you durability. And there was an implementation of Spark Shuffle [2] which was 1.3x - 3.2x faster but that isn't really stressing I/O as much as other use cases. For a filesystem you can store the entire metadata in Optane so EXISTS/LIST type operations and anything involving a bloom filter would see the full benefit e.g. order of magnitude better than NVME. [1] https://github.com/pmem/pmem-redis https://github.com/pmem/pmem-redis [2] https://databricks.com/session_na20/accelerating-apache-spark-shuffle-for-data-analytics-on-the-cloud-with-remote-persistent-memory-pools https://databricks.com/session_na20/accelerating-apache-spar...

tns-hn 4y ago

I think Intel killing Optane the way it did is premature it does make some sense in the long run. If CXL takes of the best parts of optane will live on in an industry wide standard. However I am having a hard time understanding the nuances between different CXL versions and implementations so it might end up as an example for the famous XKCD standards post. I was under the impression that optane was just starting to gain a bit more traction with major players like VMware acknowledging persistent memory through project capitola. Let's hope that Intel axe-ing Optane opens a door for industry supported pmem so that AMD systems can also benefit from it.

dang 4y ago

Related: Why Intel killed its Optane memory business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32272648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32272648 - July 2022 (6 comments) Intel to Wind Down Optane Memory Business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270799 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270799 - July 2022 (6 comments) Intel Kills Optane Memory Business - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270584 - July 2022 (1 comment)

3np 4y ago

> Optane kit is as big and as cheap as disk drive Wait what? It's always been at a significant premium per GB over both enterprise HDDs and high-speed SSDs. The cheapest DIMM module is 128GB for > $450 a pop. Even in the enterprise range you'll get 1TB of fast and durable SSD with PLP for that, and that's when I restrict myself to things that are in stock right now. Even if you would get the Optanes at 75% off, that'd still almost be twice the price. There's never been a point in the past when they've been significantly cheaper, either.

lproven 4y ago
Yes, OK, I will own up to that. It was poorly phrased. "Cheaper than RAM, but in the size range of SSDs, with performance in between the two," would have been a better way to express it.

truth_seeker 4y ago

In contrast, I would say new growing advancement of DDR, PCIE and SSD to handle more data rates for ingestion and retrieval while also being more power efficient is pretty good news.

ncmncm 4y ago

There is an OS in current use that could have used Optane directly. It used to be OS/400 on an IBM machine called AS/400. Now the machine is an "i-series", and I think emulated on a POWER machine. Under OS/400, throughout the life of the machine, malloc will never return the same address twice. If you have an address (128 bits), you can see the last thing written there, in perpetuity. And, a program started up will run until it dies. Shut down, start up again, and the programs only notice time passed. If you get a new computer, you shut the old one down and start its image on the new hardware, and again the programs don't notice. Amusingly, much of the OS was coded in pre-1990 C++, basically Java without the GC.

lproven 4y ago
[Article author here] Yes, and the FOSDEM talk that the article is partly based on mentioned that. I linked it from within this article.
meragrin_ 4y ago
> coded in pre-1990 C++, basically Java without the GC. How do you get "basically Java without the GC" from "pre-1990 C++"?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  From the language definitions. 1995 Java was, roughly, 1990 C++ with GC stuck on. It was not a thing of beauty. Its designers had absolutely no desire to code in it, themselves.

jandrewrogers 4y ago

Few people have a problem that Optane directly solves. Its utility is narrow in the best case and you would need to specifically engineer a software stack to take advantage of it for some small part of the memory address space. In many cases it is desirable for memory to be volatile. If high-throughput paging mechanics are required, like databases, this technology doesn't serve much of a purpose. Storage densities per server have only been increasing. It has some obvious utility for transaction logs and such but falls into a notorious dead spot in the market -- people with low volumes don't need the performance and people with high volumes can achieve similar results by other means for a price that isn't that different from the Optane premium. I've tried to find a use for it, and I haven't been able to. That doesn't mean a use case doesn't exist, but if it was "the biggest new idea" you'd think the use case would be more obvious for more applications.

zogomoox 4y ago
The use case is replacing flash, because modern flash cells die after a handful of writes. Surely there's a market for ultra-durable SSDs.
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  That math rarely pencils out. Most companies with large storage budgets have figured out that you can design write-intensive storage engines for cheap read-optimized flash that will last several years without an issue despite the relatively low number of write cycles. This is easy to verify on a cocktail napkin if one can assume the software is efficient with its use of storage bandwidth. In most applications with sane storage architectures, you might physically rewrite an SSD once a month, and often less, despite relatively high write intensity. Quite a lot of software is excessively wasteful with storage writes, in which case it is more of an issue. That says more about the software than the storage, and can be addressed by not being profligate.
  - anonymousDan 4y ago
    What do you mean by 'wasteful' with storage writes? That there is some unintentional write amplification going on for whatever reason?

siddontang 4y ago

Very sad to hear this news, but not so unexpected. As a distributed database engineer, we have been working with some universities and exploring the optimization of database on Intel Optane for a long time, and even have published some papers. But everything was only in the experimental stage, it was difficult for us to use the research successfully in production, because nearly all of of our customers hadn't bought Intel Optane. They thought Optane was too expensive and didn't find suitable scenarios. As far as I know, the only successful story was from one of our customer, he used Optane for Redis which had an acceptable latency and better cost-effective. Things go worse when the cloud is raising. We find that we can't use Optane on the cloud, so our later priority is to explore the optimization on the cloud disk like EBS GP3, etc.

tgv 4y ago

About the revolutionary aspect of it: primary memory instead of files. Suppose we overcome the problems mentioned in the article, then it still doesn't do anything for current software for normal tasks. E.g., how do you back up primary memory? The only way would be for the application that owns the memory to do it. How do you share files between two processes? By adding memory sharing into your application. So, many of the tasks that are normally taken care of by the OS would need to move into your application. That's not feasible. So it needs a rather different OS and run-time environment, which don't exist, plus a huge rewrite of your apps, along the services it needs, before it can be even considered. But not only that: it doesn't solve a problem big enough to make it commercially viable. It might be nice for something like Amazon's Redshift, but not for our mundane web servers and accounting programs, nor for the apps on our laptops and telephones. It's a solution in search for a problem.

pella 4y ago

~ alternative: "Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, today announced the launch of the second generation of XL-FLASH, a Storage Class Memory (SCM) solution based on its BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology, which significantly reduces bit cost while providing high performance and low latency. Product sample shipments are scheduled to start in November this year, with volume production expected to begin in 2023. The second generation XL-FLASH achieves significant reduction in bit cost as a result of the addition of new multi-level cell (MLC) functionality with 2-bit per cell, in addition to the single-level cell (SLC) of the existing model. The maximum number of planes that can operate simultaneously has also increased from the current model, which will allow for improved throughput. The new XL-FLASH will have a memory capacity of 256 gigabits. Kioxia's second generation XL-FLASH memory solution is engineered to bring higher performance and lower cost for data centers and enterprise servers and storage systems. In the future, it may also be possible to apply the product using CXL (Compute Express Link). Kioxia will continue to develop cutting-edge technologies and products to meet the needs of the expanding SCM market. Kioxia will feature the second generation XL-FLASH during its keynote presentation at the Flash Memory Summit 2022 in Santa Clara, California on August 2. " https://www.techpowerup.com/297385/kioxia-launches-second-generation-of-high-performance-cost-effective-xl-flash-storage-class-memory-solution https://www.techpowerup.com/297385/kioxia-launches-second-ge...

Dylan16807 4y ago
XL-FLASH is in the 10us latency range? That's competitive with Optane over NVMe but I wouldn't really call it an alternative to the DIMMs that could do 0.3us. I'm definitely curious about how fast it will run over CXL.
- pella 4y ago
  > XL-FLASH is in the 10us latency range? we will get more information in the next 24h "Kioxia will feature the second generation XL-FLASH™ during its keynote presentation at the Flash Memory Summit 2022 in Santa Clara, California on August 2." !

pella 4y ago

~ alternative: "Last week Intel killed Optane. Today, Kioxia and Everspin announced comparable tech" "Rumors of storage-class memory's demise may have been premature" https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/02/kioxia_everspin_persistent_memory/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/02/kioxia_everspin_persi...

transfire 4y ago

Any hope they will license the tech or pivot and offer it under a different brand and marketing approach? I was very interested in the tech but never quite understood how to utilize it, so it dropped off my radar.

dusted 4y ago

I always wondered what it'd have looked like if Optane had a frontend of regular memory (infinitely re-writable) and just had a special command to "sync" it back to persistent memory.. then the OS wouldn't need to be made aware, except for the special sync option once every while to persist..

hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 4y ago

eternityforest 4y ago

SSDs are already insanely fast, and the file model has served us well enough. It makes persistence explicit. Considering that rebooting is currently the primary way of fixing any malfunctioning device, blurring RAM and disk doesn't seem that helpful. Things will crash and you will still need that distinction to some degree, no matter what the storage tech is. Some stuff is volatile and some stuff isn't. We still need to explicitly define what happens when we reboot. What makes optane really interesting to me is the endurance. They seem like they would be great as traditional SSDs hosting databases.

branko_d 4y ago
Not just “traditional SSDs”, which are block-addressable. A byte-addressable Optane RAM would enable a database that no longer “thinks” in pages, but can independently persist much smaller pieces of its internal structures, possibly leading to new paradigms compared to what we have now. Perhaps write-ahead logs, B-Trees and other stuff can be implemented better when you are no longer limited to writing entire pages?
tester756 4y ago
AFAIK they were used for databases

rasz 4y ago

>Optane presented a radical, transformative technology but because of this legacy view, this technical debt, few in the industry realized just how radical Optane was. And so it bombed. No. It bombed because Intel is not in a habit of reducing prices. Why optimize production and sell more instead of milking top 1% of your corporate clients? P4800X was introduced in 2017 at $1.5K 375GB, guess how much cheaper its now :)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ianai 4y ago

This is definitely a case where hardware surpassed software in that classic “debate”. Intel probably needed to do a reference implementation in Windows/Linux for it to gain teeth though.

rbanffy 4y ago
Indeed. Sometimes the "build it and they'll come" doesn't work at all. It Itanium had excellent Linux support on day one it could have been a different story. To this day I complain loudly IBM has no entry-level desktop/deskside POWER machines that are appealing to people who would buy a generic x86 workstation. If all they have is hardware for current clients to upgrade to, the platform becomes legacy pretty quickly. I will go as far as saying ARM servers would never have happened were it not for pioneering stuff like the Raspberry Pi and other small hobbyist boards that served as an entry level and proved ARM was viable as a Linux host.
powerhour 4y ago
Making a version affordable and available to small time randos would probably have helped as well. Was it even possible to buy a complete system at something other than call-for-pricing pricing?

rbanffy 4y ago

Just to be picky, if I remember it correctly, IBM's AS/400 (and its descendants, IBM i) were based on the idea of all storage being directly addressable by the CPU. When I say AS/400 was ahead of its time and, in some aspects, ahead of ours, I am not entirely joking.

blockarchitech 4y ago

Optane was very cool, but at the same time it quickly turned into a very niche product. If I'm not mistaken, once of the primary purposes was to accelerate spinning disk drives. However, I really don't think that's needed nowadays as hard drives aren't really that horrible now and SSDs are getting cheaper and cheaper every year. I think if Intel really focused on what they were trying to do, I really do think they would have had success in the data center for accelerating data center drives.

teleforce 4y ago

This is by far the most informative article coming from The Register, I'd had expected this article coming from AnandTech or similar news outlets. Back in last year 2021, Linus was asked what is the most special about Linux in an interview, and he pointed to the Linux File System as the fastest in the business [1]. Now imagine an OS (Linux or not) having a first class in-memory file system, and it will blows away any conventional OS file-system, and Optane can provide this possibility at an affordable cost. I know that you can get several Terabytes of RAM with Xeon CPUs now, but at the moment the cost will be prohibitive. The above mentioned feature has a killer application namely non-linear time-frequency analysis [2]. This quadratic complexity algorithm need to have huge amount of working memory in order to work effectively. I have a paper on this topic applied to biomedical field and it is currently trending on top of the page in Google search for several years now due to the highest accuracy, specificity and sensitivity of more than 99%. Apparently it's a sleeper paper because other researchers would avoid citing the article due to its very high accuracy using commonly available datasets hence lower ranking (still high but not top or front page) on the subject in Google Scholar search. During a meeting with Micron engineers earlier this year I have conveyed my condolence to them. [1]https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and-git https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds... [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_time%E2%80%93frequency_distribution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_time%E2%80%93freque...

lproven 4y ago
> This is by far the most informative article coming from The Register, I'd had expected this article coming from AnandTech or similar news outlets. Thank you. :-) I am trying to do some more in-depth analytical pieces for the site, and I am delighted that several of them have done very well -- not only on HN.
twoodfin 4y ago
The second part of your comment hints at the trouble with your first: Optane didn’t provide major benefits over existing storage architectures when used for a block-addressable file system. It had significant density benefits when used as RAM, but at an equally significant latency penalty. To really see wins, you needed an application data model that could benefit from the high density/single node capacity, byte-addressability, and persistence. Basically an in-memory database, either general purpose or embedded in a specialized data processing application. Those are premium, niche markets, and could never support the demand Intel needed to make commercial sense.

AuthorizedCust 4y ago

The article makes a case, to me at least, that Unix’s “everything is a file” mindset may be increasingly a liability.

lproven 4y ago
[Author here] Yes, that's exactly right. The mindset was apt when RAM was tiny and expensive, and the only way to get large amounts of space was disks. That is no longer true.

mastax 4y ago

I'm really sad to see optane go. Byte-addressable, high-endurance, consistent low latency. It was the platonic ideal of solid state storage. But flash is more than good enough and it's cheap. Even pretty good quality NVMe drives are approaching $100/2TB.

marcodiego 4y ago

What I really want: a connector that allows me to put DDR3 modules on a SATA port and use it as a swap partition.

deleted 4y ago
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replygirl 4y ago
please ewaste the old ram honey, the kids are getting too old to share a bedroom
awiesenhofer 4y ago
I remember some 10+ years ago there were pcie cards you could stick ddr2 modules into - but i can't seem to find a modern equivalent... Edit: found the old one though, Gigabyte i-RAM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM
- marcodiego 4y ago
  I'd love to have a simple DDR3 to SATA connector and get cheap upgrades for my laptop.

ribit 4y ago

Optane was a very interesting technology but I don't think it as revolutionary as the article makes it to be. First, Optane does not make the memory hierarchy simpler as you still need fast RAM to solve the write endurance problem. Second, it is not obvious that Optane would be cost-competitive with SSDs. Third, you don't need a tech like that to implement a persistent memory system like one described in the article: just use RAM backed by an SSD and a battery/capacitor to flush the dirty pages in an event of power failure. I think Apple does something like this in their newer devices. This indeed leaves Optane as a limited-use enterprise persistent cache technology.

perlgeek 4y ago

> But Intel made it work, produced this stuff, put it on the market… and not enough people were interested, and now it is giving up, too. That sounds like a dubious claim to me, at least if we take the hyping up at face value. If Optane was really that awesome, why not build a database on top that's either much faster or much cheaper than what we have now? Then sell that to a cloud vendor. The end user is only interested in the wire protocol (and up the stack from there) that they speak to the database, and not the underlying OS. I cannot imagine Intel going to one of the three major cloud vendors, offering a 10x improvement (in either cost or performance) for one of their larger offerings, and the cloud vendor simply saying "nope, not interested". Maybe the practical improvements simply weren't there?

nvmefs 4y ago

Any chance DAOS will survive? https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/high-performance-computing/daos.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/high-performance-com... https://docs.daos.io/v2.0 https://docs.daos.io/v2.0 https://github.com/daos-stack/daos https://github.com/daos-stack/daos

touisteur 4y ago

This doesn't give me great hopes for Processing In Memory... Either they get full compatibility with existing DRAM at same performance, or they won't see mass adoption.

ajolly 4y ago

I love my optane drives. One of the biggest quality of life upgrades for my desktop.