3 ms·

It had good performance, but part of the problem is that Intel way oversold it at the beginning. They said they would be "1000x faster, 1000x more enduring, and

It had good performance, but part of the problem is that Intel way oversold it at the beginning. They said they would be "1000x faster, 1000x more enduring, and 10x more dense than NAND". In the end none of these promises materialized. They released these puny little drives that had a bit better latency than NVMe SSDs, that were locked to Intel systems, that OSs didn't know what to do with them, and that didn't quite fit anywhere in the memory hierarchy. Yeah, it found a few niche uses, but it was never going to be sustainable.

deleted 4y ago
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anonymousDan 4y ago
I wonder if standardisation efforts around things like UCIe and CXL will solve the locked to Intel problem, potentially enabling a sustainable market for such devices in future?
wtallis 4y ago
> "1000x faster, 1000x more enduring, and 10x more dense than NAND" Their claims were actually a mix of comparisons against NAND and DRAM; I don't think they ever claimed it would be denser than NAND, just denser than DRAM. Also, the Optane SSDs were never locked to Intel systems, just their caching software for Windows and the Optane DIMMs.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  >Their claims were actually a mix of comparisons against NAND and DRAM; I don't think they ever claimed it would be denser than NAND, just denser than DRAM. You're right. I looked up the slide before commenting to look at the numbers and misread it. Actually, that reminds me that the first time I saw the slide years ago I hoped we were going to have Optane memory sticks and desktops with hundreds of gigabytes of main memory, even if with worse latency. I remember being so disappointed when Optane finally came out and reading the actual numbers. Yeah, the latency was okayish, but the throughput was barely better than NAND. >Also, the Optane SSDs were never locked to Intel systems, just their caching software for Windows and the Optane DIMMs. If anything, that just makes it worse. I was quite interested in Optane, and I can't remember which things were what and what they worked on. The product line was so confusing.
nolanhergert89 4y ago
Don't confuse the Optane SSD products (worse binned media over a slower NVMe link) with the higher-performance (and more expensive) Optane Persistent Memory product. For the latter, the latency looks to be sub-microsecond (~100X? SSDs), bandwidth is ~3-5X SSDs, ~10X more endurance, and up to 10X more dense than DRAM (512GB sticks anyone?). Don't have a specific good source though, just from Googling. I wasn't a marketing person, but I was on the engineering side.
- fluoridation 4y ago
  Like I said in the other comment, all I cared about was having many gigs of memory on desktop. I never got a whiff of those 512 GB sticks, although I sure would have loved to get my hands on them. If Intel segmented them for the datacenter then whoop-de-fucking-doo. All I ever saw were shitty little useless cache drives.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  That really sounds like they need better marketing people lol Why would they name those two things the SAME? Call one Optane and one of them Budge-Tane or something
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Not OP but marketing was obviously a huge problem for Optane. Intel Marketing did an absolutely terrible job. * You've got Optane Memory, the PDIMM, which only works with a limited set of Intel products * You've got Optane the NVMe drive, which works with anything, and are available in sizes usable as a boot disk or for databases/ZIL/etc * You've got Optane Memory, the 16gb/32gb cache drive used in shitty laptops to try and boost performance, but actually those are just really small NVMe SSDs and can be used as such if you want. * You've got Optane the caching software, which only works with Intel motherboards/laptops, and basically does the same thing as PrimoCache/StoreMI. etc. And Intel marketing just made zero effort to distinguish or clarify these products in any way... to this day you get people thinking you had to own an intel system to use optane drives.
    - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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anonymousDan 4y ago

I wonder if standardisation efforts around things like UCIe and CXL will solve the locked to Intel problem, potentially enabling a sustainable market for such devices in future?

wtallis 4y ago

> "1000x faster, 1000x more enduring, and 10x more dense than NAND" Their claims were actually a mix of comparisons against NAND and DRAM; I don't think they ever claimed it would be denser than NAND, just denser than DRAM. Also, the Optane SSDs were never locked to Intel systems, just their caching software for Windows and the Optane DIMMs.

fluoridation 4y ago
>Their claims were actually a mix of comparisons against NAND and DRAM; I don't think they ever claimed it would be denser than NAND, just denser than DRAM. You're right. I looked up the slide before commenting to look at the numbers and misread it. Actually, that reminds me that the first time I saw the slide years ago I hoped we were going to have Optane memory sticks and desktops with hundreds of gigabytes of main memory, even if with worse latency. I remember being so disappointed when Optane finally came out and reading the actual numbers. Yeah, the latency was okayish, but the throughput was barely better than NAND. >Also, the Optane SSDs were never locked to Intel systems, just their caching software for Windows and the Optane DIMMs. If anything, that just makes it worse. I was quite interested in Optane, and I can't remember which things were what and what they worked on. The product line was so confusing.

nolanhergert89 4y ago

Don't confuse the Optane SSD products (worse binned media over a slower NVMe link) with the higher-performance (and more expensive) Optane Persistent Memory product. For the latter, the latency looks to be sub-microsecond (~100X? SSDs), bandwidth is ~3-5X SSDs, ~10X more endurance, and up to 10X more dense than DRAM (512GB sticks anyone?). Don't have a specific good source though, just from Googling. I wasn't a marketing person, but I was on the engineering side.

fluoridation 4y ago
Like I said in the other comment, all I cared about was having many gigs of memory on desktop. I never got a whiff of those 512 GB sticks, although I sure would have loved to get my hands on them. If Intel segmented them for the datacenter then whoop-de-fucking-doo. All I ever saw were shitty little useless cache drives.
Melatonic 4y ago
That really sounds like they need better marketing people lol Why would they name those two things the SAME? Call one Optane and one of them Budge-Tane or something
- paulmd 4y ago
  Not OP but marketing was obviously a huge problem for Optane. Intel Marketing did an absolutely terrible job. * You've got Optane Memory, the PDIMM, which only works with a limited set of Intel products * You've got Optane the NVMe drive, which works with anything, and are available in sizes usable as a boot disk or for databases/ZIL/etc * You've got Optane Memory, the 16gb/32gb cache drive used in shitty laptops to try and boost performance, but actually those are just really small NVMe SSDs and can be used as such if you want. * You've got Optane the caching software, which only works with Intel motherboards/laptops, and basically does the same thing as PrimoCache/StoreMI. etc. And Intel marketing just made zero effort to distinguish or clarify these products in any way... to this day you get people thinking you had to own an intel system to use optane drives.
  - 4y ago