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Optane was also a contender for the biggest fundamental shift - byte addressable persistent memory with insane endurance is simply in a different class to every
by r1ch 3y ago
Optane was also a contender for the biggest fundamental shift - byte addressable persistent memory with insane endurance is simply in a different class to every other SSD technology out there. No need for a FTL. No need for a DRAM / SLC cache. Unfortunately no software really took advantage of it, OSes still provisioned it as 512/4096 byte sectors, etc. so in standard benchmarks it never really looked that compelling over a regular NVME drive. But if the access patterns align, nothing can come close. Truly a technology ahead of its time.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIt always made me surprised that Intel didn't market it better, such as forking linux and writing some custom additions that could allow the Optane drives to demonstrate real world 10x improvements.
- paulmd 3y agoIntel already has Clear Linux actually. I don't think there's really a ton you can do at an OS level. ZFS L2ARC, system swap, etc, but a lot of the benefits would come from tuning DB configs/etc to suit the new hardware. If it's a fast SSD... ok are you the DBA? Similarly, PDIMM is really best utilized by a ground-up rethink of applications operating in a persistent context (think of like, javacard multicore 1TB or whatever). If you treat it as slow RAM it's gonna be slow RAM. The point would be building systems and applications that exploit the "writing the memory is now writing the disk" idiom. The ideal ecosytem for PDIMM isn't Linux at all, it's JVM, or LISP/Haskell. Or android I suppose lol.
- PaulHoule 3y agoOptane was either the fastest SSD you ever had or the slowest RAM. Incorporating it into the memory hierarchy might not be a win if you are replacing fast RAM with slow Optane.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoI assume for marketing figures, Optane would replace the SSD at a much higher cost.