5 ms·

Optane was an interesting solution that was still looking for a question. One of the things that drove mass SSD adoption was the experience was plainly better.

Optane was an interesting solution that was still looking for a question. One of the things that drove mass SSD adoption was the experience was plainly better. Even the most illiterate user could see how fucking fast an SSD machine booted and how much more responsive they were. SSD to Optane? There's no practical difference. The high end desktop users and serious gamers that have serious cash for their rigs turned up their noses at Optane because it turns out SSD sequential read was good enough for most use cases. At least good enough to not pay 3x more per GB. Nobody really cared about insane sustained write speed when the SLC caches did almost as well in most use cases. Plus as the interfaces scaled up, plain old NAND drives were ready to flood the bus with as much sequential read bandwidth that the bus would take. What could have saved it? I dunno. If Intel wanted to be anti-competitive they could have slapped on 8 PCIe lanes direct to the CPU exclusively for Optane on their desktop products. As we've found out, 4 lanes of NVMe to the CPU and the rest having to go through the chipset is some sort of unfunny, market segmentation joke. It could have forced high end users to grudgingly accept Optane as the path to the absolute best I/O and an actual, tangible difference in performance.

luma 4y ago
I think one of the major missing factors is lack of OS support for the sorts of features that NVDIMM could potentially bring to the table. Super-fast wake from deep hibernation is just a starting point, the real work is re-writing every line of code written since the dawn of computing which starts from the two assumptions "one kind of storage is persistent and slow" and "the other kind of storage is volatile and fast". HPE made noise about challenging those assumptions with The Machine but predictably lost interest as their own memristor technology lost steam.
orlp 4y ago
> What could have saved it? Persistent memory was/is a big topic in the database research world. The idea was that you would not need to worry about ACID since all your data is still there in the event of a power loss/crash. It would massively simplify database code. However as it turns out... persistent memory doesn't buy you all that much. You still effectively need a replay log to restore the state you were in before a crash event, and you still need all the restoration code. In the end it in most systems it just behaved as a very fast (and expensive) SSD. The benefits vs. price just wasn't there as a modern DB setup on a fast SSD + more RAM would get you much more performance per dollar. What you'd really need is transactional memory, not just persistent memory. And you'd need a database engine written completely from the ground up to use this memory. Probably several hundred KLoC of tricky code (and all the joys that come with parallel programming), targeted at hardware that doesn't even exist yet. Sounds very expensive and risky to me. I think eventually we'll see something in this line of technology become commercially available. But I'm not surprised that Intel pulled out.
- gavinray 4y ago
  > " And you'd need a database engine written completely from the ground up to use this memory." You mean like the one from one of CMU's research projects, that Pavlo et al have written about? https://db.cs.cmu.edu/projects/nvm/ https://db.cs.cmu.edu/projects/nvm/ "How to Build a Non-Volatile Memory Database Management System," in Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data, 2017 "Spitfire: A Three-Tier Buffer Manager for Volatile and Non-Volatile Memory," in Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data, 2021, pp. 2195-2207.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  Optane was pretty great for fs and db logs / journals. That was pretty much its killer (practical) use case.
Melatonic 4y ago
It could have made a big difference but it was adoption that was the problem. Swapping an SSD from a HDD is very easy and straight forward for most people - SATA cables are also well designed and easy to understand. Its almost like a USB cable in an L shape. Completely changing the format? That is a huge obstacle. NVME SSD's also came along soon enough we got something that was much, much faster than SATA SSD's and eventually I think it just became clear it was diminishing returns. That being said I am still hoping for an Optane replacement.
paulmd 4y ago
> One of the things that drove mass SSD adoption was the experience was plainly better. Even the most illiterate user could see how fucking fast an SSD machine booted and how much more responsive they were. > SSD to Optane? There's no practical difference. No, that's false. That's true of NVMe in general but Optane specifically is really good at the low-queue-depth random-4k workloads that characterize consumer use-cases. Optane actually is extremely fast at things like OS patches that normally take a few minutes even on NVMe flash let alone sata. They boot faster, applications launch faster, etc. Normally those things don't have lots of parallel threads running so queue depth is low and flash doesn't perform very well (as in, SATA and NVMe are nearly indistinguishable), but Optane really helps. Is that worth paying 10x as much for? No, probably not, but that's the real problem, not the general lack of performance. Optane is actually noticeable specifically for being the first thing that actually provides a noticeable improvement above and beyond SATA SSDs for consumer use-cases. It's just also too expensive to be justifiable.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Although "client computing" is still the largest source of Intel revenue, and its scale was what made the x86 architecture able to crush legacy server architectures, I think Intel takes it for granted relative to the data center. It would have been very interesting to see an "all Optane" tablet device but it would have been hard to make work: a modest amount of storage would be affordable but it would take a clean sheet OS to maximize performance and economics. I was skeptical about Optane DIMMs. Optane SSDs were the fastest SSD you'd ever seen, but the DIMMS were the slowest you'd seen in a while. Although they were faster than Optane SSDs, they were slower than RAM if you replaced RAM 1-1. Optane was denser and cheaper than ordinary RAM so you could pack your machine with a huge quantity of slow RAM. If access patterns and cache behavior permit, you could build systems of a certain problem size that perform well with Optane. Advanced programming techniques can help. For every big problem there are many little problems (don't need Optane) and some problems are too big for Optane. Many problems in the size range for Optane can be implemented to conserve RAM and have access patterns that stream well to mass storage. Thus Optane faced fierce competition.
  - 4y ago
christkv 4y ago
They should have sold it as level 4 cache
- skyde 4y ago
  you mean swap drive ?
  - cleansingfire 4y ago
    That's what I used the <$10 16gb Optane sticks for, when I had a batch of terrible small zero cache SSDs. Just to extend the performant life of the hardware I was stuck with. Worked ok.
mort96 4y ago
What's more, Optane was sold as... a cache to have in front of your spinning rust. In an age where SSDs were cheap enough that you could just get a few TB of SSD and have all your data access sped up, not just what happens to be in cache.

luma 4y ago

I think one of the major missing factors is lack of OS support for the sorts of features that NVDIMM could potentially bring to the table. Super-fast wake from deep hibernation is just a starting point, the real work is re-writing every line of code written since the dawn of computing which starts from the two assumptions "one kind of storage is persistent and slow" and "the other kind of storage is volatile and fast". HPE made noise about challenging those assumptions with The Machine but predictably lost interest as their own memristor technology lost steam.

orlp 4y ago

> What could have saved it? Persistent memory was/is a big topic in the database research world. The idea was that you would not need to worry about ACID since all your data is still there in the event of a power loss/crash. It would massively simplify database code. However as it turns out... persistent memory doesn't buy you all that much. You still effectively need a replay log to restore the state you were in before a crash event, and you still need all the restoration code. In the end it in most systems it just behaved as a very fast (and expensive) SSD. The benefits vs. price just wasn't there as a modern DB setup on a fast SSD + more RAM would get you much more performance per dollar. What you'd really need is transactional memory, not just persistent memory. And you'd need a database engine written completely from the ground up to use this memory. Probably several hundred KLoC of tricky code (and all the joys that come with parallel programming), targeted at hardware that doesn't even exist yet. Sounds very expensive and risky to me. I think eventually we'll see something in this line of technology become commercially available. But I'm not surprised that Intel pulled out.

gavinray 4y ago
> " And you'd need a database engine written completely from the ground up to use this memory." You mean like the one from one of CMU's research projects, that Pavlo et al have written about? https://db.cs.cmu.edu/projects/nvm/ https://db.cs.cmu.edu/projects/nvm/ "How to Build a Non-Volatile Memory Database Management System," in Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data, 2017 "Spitfire: A Three-Tier Buffer Manager for Volatile and Non-Volatile Memory," in Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data, 2021, pp. 2195-2207.
xyzzy123 4y ago
Optane was pretty great for fs and db logs / journals. That was pretty much its killer (practical) use case.

Melatonic 4y ago

It could have made a big difference but it was adoption that was the problem. Swapping an SSD from a HDD is very easy and straight forward for most people - SATA cables are also well designed and easy to understand. Its almost like a USB cable in an L shape. Completely changing the format? That is a huge obstacle. NVME SSD's also came along soon enough we got something that was much, much faster than SATA SSD's and eventually I think it just became clear it was diminishing returns. That being said I am still hoping for an Optane replacement.

paulmd 4y ago

> One of the things that drove mass SSD adoption was the experience was plainly better. Even the most illiterate user could see how fucking fast an SSD machine booted and how much more responsive they were. > SSD to Optane? There's no practical difference. No, that's false. That's true of NVMe in general but Optane specifically is really good at the low-queue-depth random-4k workloads that characterize consumer use-cases. Optane actually is extremely fast at things like OS patches that normally take a few minutes even on NVMe flash let alone sata. They boot faster, applications launch faster, etc. Normally those things don't have lots of parallel threads running so queue depth is low and flash doesn't perform very well (as in, SATA and NVMe are nearly indistinguishable), but Optane really helps. Is that worth paying 10x as much for? No, probably not, but that's the real problem, not the general lack of performance. Optane is actually noticeable specifically for being the first thing that actually provides a noticeable improvement above and beyond SATA SSDs for consumer use-cases. It's just also too expensive to be justifiable.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Although "client computing" is still the largest source of Intel revenue, and its scale was what made the x86 architecture able to crush legacy server architectures, I think Intel takes it for granted relative to the data center. It would have been very interesting to see an "all Optane" tablet device but it would have been hard to make work: a modest amount of storage would be affordable but it would take a clean sheet OS to maximize performance and economics. I was skeptical about Optane DIMMs. Optane SSDs were the fastest SSD you'd ever seen, but the DIMMS were the slowest you'd seen in a while. Although they were faster than Optane SSDs, they were slower than RAM if you replaced RAM 1-1. Optane was denser and cheaper than ordinary RAM so you could pack your machine with a huge quantity of slow RAM. If access patterns and cache behavior permit, you could build systems of a certain problem size that perform well with Optane. Advanced programming techniques can help. For every big problem there are many little problems (don't need Optane) and some problems are too big for Optane. Many problems in the size range for Optane can be implemented to conserve RAM and have access patterns that stream well to mass storage. Thus Optane faced fierce competition.
- 4y ago

christkv 4y ago

They should have sold it as level 4 cache

skyde 4y ago
you mean swap drive ?
- cleansingfire 4y ago
  That's what I used the <$10 16gb Optane sticks for, when I had a batch of terrible small zero cache SSDs. Just to extend the performant life of the hardware I was stuck with. Worked ok.

mort96 4y ago

What's more, Optane was sold as... a cache to have in front of your spinning rust. In an age where SSDs were cheap enough that you could just get a few TB of SSD and have all your data access sped up, not just what happens to be in cache.