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What was interesting about Optane was that it was kinda an attempt to get rid of disk and ram distinction. You had single device (optane stick) which served as

What was interesting about Optane was that it was kinda an attempt to get rid of disk and ram distinction. You had single device (optane stick) which served as both - ram and disk. After decades of current approach we finally could physically get rid of disks - hdds, ssds or even nvme sticks. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancellation/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella... >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.

Dalewyn 3y ago
So the winning move now is for Apple to announce iOptane and sweep the data storage and cache industries by storm?
- ritwikgupta 3y ago
  Apple may already be headed in that direction. They already have unified CPU and GPU RAM. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that they could unify persistent storage and memory.
  - znpy 3y ago
    Knowing apple’s marketing moves, they could definitely do that: just use a single number to describe memory. And then pretend it’s a big number.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      I can already see it: base 128GB of total system unified memory for your files and data.
      - Affric 3y ago
        Keep all other files in iCloud for big money. Genius
  - satiric 3y ago
    Well technically, Intel and AMD both use the regular system RAM for their integrated graphics VRAM, but I see what you mean.
    - masklinn 3y ago
      Intel and AMD also do support unified memory for their integrated graphics. It’s been a while since you needed a statically cordoned-off area of main memory (“shared memory”) for the iGPU to work. Consoles have been using unified memory since the 8th gen (PS4/XB1/Switch, kinda sorta even WiiU). And NVidia has CUDA unified-memory slide decks going back at least 5 years.
      - alpaca128 3y ago
        The Xbox360 already had unified memory too. That gave it a slight edge compared to the PS3 in the long term because it was more flexible compared to a fixed 50:50 split.
        NikkiA 3y ago
        The original xbox before it too.
        pezezin 3y ago
        And the N64 before them. I think it was the first console with unified memory.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  I think they'd rather call it iMemory and jack up the price of the iDevices using it by 25‰.
hlandau 3y ago
Still waiting for the Memristor...
- jamiek88 3y ago
  Oh jeez I was so excited for that!
  - dghughes 3y ago
    At first I was resistant but now I am charged for it.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Optane was probably a memristor technology under the hood.
zinodaur 3y ago
Yeah - the article was talking about mmap... but what i wanted was to not have to define persistence boundary. I wanted the entire in-memory state of my program to be persisted - perhaps even duplicated and moved elsewhere
- ddalex 3y ago
  But then you can't just reset the state when crashes happen and data corrupts
  - gumby 3y ago
    This shouldn’t be voted down. This problem, in the more general case, was inherent at the system level with the persistent and PARC’s immersive Smalltalk and Interlisp environments on the D-Machines. It was much better to have full source you could reload into a fresh environment.
- tanelpoder 3y ago
  mmap on Optane direct-access-aware (DAX) filesystems like EXT4/XFS now, is not like mmap on block devices where the OS gets in your way and pages stuff in from disk and (maybe) later syncs it back to persistent storage. Optane is the persistent storage, it's just usable/addressable as regular RAM as it's plugged in to DIMM slots. And in the later Xeon architecture (Xeon Scalable 3rd gen, I think), intel expanded the persistence domain to CPU caches too. So, you didn't even have to bother with CLFLUSH and CLWB instructions to manually ensure that some cache lines (not 512B blocks, but 64B cache lines) get persisted. You could operate in the CPU cache and in the event of power loss, the CPU/mem controllers/and the capacitors on Optane DCPMMs ensured that the dirty cache lines got persisted to Optane before the CPU lights went off. But all this coolness a bit too late... Another note: Intel's marketing had terrible naming for Optane stuff. Optane DCPMMs are the ones that go into DIMM slots and have all the cool features. Optane Memory SSDs (like Optane H10) are just NAND SSDs with some Optane cache in front of them. These are flash disks, installed in PCIe slots but Intel decided to call these disks "Optane Memory" ...
  - 3y ago
Aardwolf 3y ago
I had a calculator from the early 90s like that, the HP 48GX, 128K RAM, but it kept it storage when shutting it off and on again. Certainly very convenient!
mike_hock 3y ago
Like Itanium, it was one of those Intel projects that was simultaneously too ambitious and not ambitious enough. If Intel really wanted to redesign the Von Neumann architecture, they would have had to be prepared to absorb losses for much longer, way north of a decade. The alternative might have been to focus exclusively on providing SSDs using the new technology and maybe try to segue into this new memory architecture 10 years later. Like Itanium should have initially focused on beating competing x86_32 chips of the era in benchmarks and ship the new ISA as an afterthought. Thank you, Intel, for trying to push the envelope, though.
- avidphantasm 3y ago
  I think it will be basically impossible to move away from von Neumann unless you control the entire stack, including OS and software. I don’t even think Apple could do it with Mac, because they are general purpose machines (for now at least). Maybe Apple could do it with iOS devices. Nintendo might be able to pull it off, though people trying port titles from other platforms may no longer try to do so. Because so many AAA titles go between XBox and PS, I don’t think Sony would try.
  - theandrewbailey 3y ago
    I'm not sure if Sony would want to make a system with a very unique architecture again. Devs complained about how hard it was to program PS2 games, and again with PS3. PS4 and 5 are practically PCs by comparison.
    - acdha 3y ago
      I don’t want to say that we’ll never see big architecture changes again but I think a company like Sony would want more confidence that they’d get real advantages. Cell wasn’t just unpopular with developers but also never delivered compelling performance; I suspect if they’d had a PC CPU and a Blu-ray player at the same price it would’ve sold identically. Anyone trying this needs to figure out a decade-long schedule with points where something would be worth using for some reason so they don’t have to run the whole thing in a vacuum hoping it’ll be worth it at the end.
rcxdude 3y ago
The problem is optane wasn't as fast as DRAM, nor as cheap as disk. So you still needed the conceptual split anyway, and there wasn't a compelling reason to really use it (OK, I can get a lot of RAM but it's 1/10th the speed of my normal RAM, which will kill both memory latency and memory bandwidth limited applications, which is basically any workload which wants lots of RAM. Or I can get super fast persistent storage with high durability but much higher cost, which basically makes it good for a persistent cache but not that much else, considering SSDs are now similarly fast even though their durability is not as good). It wasn't sunk by a stuck-in-the-mud way of thinking about memory versus disk, it was sunk because the tech never got good enough to actually achieve their ambitions.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Hmm, ive seen report by fujitsu that it was fine if used with dram >Intel Optane persistent memory is blurring the line between DRAM and persistent storage for in-memory computing. Unlike DRAM, Intel Optane persistent memory retains its data if power to the server is lost or the server reboots, but it still provides *near-DRAM performance*. In SAP HANA operation this results in tangible benefits >Speeds up shutdowns, starts and restarts many times over – significantly reduce system downtime and lower operational costs  Process more data in real-time with increased memory capacity  Lower total cost of ownership by transforming the data storage hierarchy  Improve business continuity with persistent memory and fast data loads at startup https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-performance-report-primergy-inteloptane-saphane.pdf https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-perfor...
- crabbone 3y ago
  Where Optane could've been used: distributed storage. The whole game there is about how fast can you ack the writes while writing as far away as you can. The company I worked for in this specific area had used pmem when that was available for that specific reason. I'm no expert on costs of these things and especially wouldn't dare to predict how these costs could've behaved in the future, but my guess would be not that the technology had no use, rather that it was too expensive for what it was good at, and the second best was cheap enough to warrant choosing it over Optane.
rewmie 3y ago
> What was interesting about Optane was that it was kinda an attempt to get rid of disk and ram distinction. That might be the promise, but that premise is fundamentally flawed. I mean, what drives the need to classify memory devices is performance characteristics, and even if your starting point is this idealized world where Optane was ubiquitous then all it took was a ephemeral memory technology to significantly outperform Optane to create need support the performance-oriented non-persistent memory type.
xtracto 3y ago
I was just thinking about optane now that I'm dealing with AWS lambda cold starts. It wold be a great use for that technology to decrease function startup time .
- ori_b 3y ago
  The problem is that if you want to keep the server state around, there's already a cheap and easy solution: write a persistent server.

Dalewyn 3y ago

So the winning move now is for Apple to announce iOptane and sweep the data storage and cache industries by storm?

ritwikgupta 3y ago
Apple may already be headed in that direction. They already have unified CPU and GPU RAM. It doesn’t seem far-fetched to imagine that they could unify persistent storage and memory.
- znpy 3y ago
  Knowing apple’s marketing moves, they could definitely do that: just use a single number to describe memory. And then pretend it’s a big number.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    I can already see it: base 128GB of total system unified memory for your files and data.
    - Affric 3y ago
      Keep all other files in iCloud for big money. Genius
- satiric 3y ago
  Well technically, Intel and AMD both use the regular system RAM for their integrated graphics VRAM, but I see what you mean.
  - masklinn 3y ago
    Intel and AMD also do support unified memory for their integrated graphics. It’s been a while since you needed a statically cordoned-off area of main memory (“shared memory”) for the iGPU to work. Consoles have been using unified memory since the 8th gen (PS4/XB1/Switch, kinda sorta even WiiU). And NVidia has CUDA unified-memory slide decks going back at least 5 years.
    - alpaca128 3y ago
      The Xbox360 already had unified memory too. That gave it a slight edge compared to the PS3 in the long term because it was more flexible compared to a fixed 50:50 split.
      - NikkiA 3y ago
        The original xbox before it too.
        pezezin 3y ago
        And the N64 before them. I think it was the first console with unified memory.
DeathArrow 3y ago
I think they'd rather call it iMemory and jack up the price of the iDevices using it by 25‰.

hlandau 3y ago

Still waiting for the Memristor...

jamiek88 3y ago
Oh jeez I was so excited for that!
- dghughes 3y ago
  At first I was resistant but now I am charged for it.
pclmulqdq 3y ago
Optane was probably a memristor technology under the hood.

zinodaur 3y ago

Yeah - the article was talking about mmap... but what i wanted was to not have to define persistence boundary. I wanted the entire in-memory state of my program to be persisted - perhaps even duplicated and moved elsewhere

ddalex 3y ago
But then you can't just reset the state when crashes happen and data corrupts
- gumby 3y ago
  This shouldn’t be voted down. This problem, in the more general case, was inherent at the system level with the persistent and PARC’s immersive Smalltalk and Interlisp environments on the D-Machines. It was much better to have full source you could reload into a fresh environment.
tanelpoder 3y ago
mmap on Optane direct-access-aware (DAX) filesystems like EXT4/XFS now, is not like mmap on block devices where the OS gets in your way and pages stuff in from disk and (maybe) later syncs it back to persistent storage. Optane is the persistent storage, it's just usable/addressable as regular RAM as it's plugged in to DIMM slots. And in the later Xeon architecture (Xeon Scalable 3rd gen, I think), intel expanded the persistence domain to CPU caches too. So, you didn't even have to bother with CLFLUSH and CLWB instructions to manually ensure that some cache lines (not 512B blocks, but 64B cache lines) get persisted. You could operate in the CPU cache and in the event of power loss, the CPU/mem controllers/and the capacitors on Optane DCPMMs ensured that the dirty cache lines got persisted to Optane before the CPU lights went off. But all this coolness a bit too late... Another note: Intel's marketing had terrible naming for Optane stuff. Optane DCPMMs are the ones that go into DIMM slots and have all the cool features. Optane Memory SSDs (like Optane H10) are just NAND SSDs with some Optane cache in front of them. These are flash disks, installed in PCIe slots but Intel decided to call these disks "Optane Memory" ...
- 3y ago

Aardwolf 3y ago

I had a calculator from the early 90s like that, the HP 48GX, 128K RAM, but it kept it storage when shutting it off and on again. Certainly very convenient!

mike_hock 3y ago

Like Itanium, it was one of those Intel projects that was simultaneously too ambitious and not ambitious enough. If Intel really wanted to redesign the Von Neumann architecture, they would have had to be prepared to absorb losses for much longer, way north of a decade. The alternative might have been to focus exclusively on providing SSDs using the new technology and maybe try to segue into this new memory architecture 10 years later. Like Itanium should have initially focused on beating competing x86_32 chips of the era in benchmarks and ship the new ISA as an afterthought. Thank you, Intel, for trying to push the envelope, though.

avidphantasm 3y ago
I think it will be basically impossible to move away from von Neumann unless you control the entire stack, including OS and software. I don’t even think Apple could do it with Mac, because they are general purpose machines (for now at least). Maybe Apple could do it with iOS devices. Nintendo might be able to pull it off, though people trying port titles from other platforms may no longer try to do so. Because so many AAA titles go between XBox and PS, I don’t think Sony would try.
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  I'm not sure if Sony would want to make a system with a very unique architecture again. Devs complained about how hard it was to program PS2 games, and again with PS3. PS4 and 5 are practically PCs by comparison.
  - acdha 3y ago
    I don’t want to say that we’ll never see big architecture changes again but I think a company like Sony would want more confidence that they’d get real advantages. Cell wasn’t just unpopular with developers but also never delivered compelling performance; I suspect if they’d had a PC CPU and a Blu-ray player at the same price it would’ve sold identically. Anyone trying this needs to figure out a decade-long schedule with points where something would be worth using for some reason so they don’t have to run the whole thing in a vacuum hoping it’ll be worth it at the end.

rcxdude 3y ago

The problem is optane wasn't as fast as DRAM, nor as cheap as disk. So you still needed the conceptual split anyway, and there wasn't a compelling reason to really use it (OK, I can get a lot of RAM but it's 1/10th the speed of my normal RAM, which will kill both memory latency and memory bandwidth limited applications, which is basically any workload which wants lots of RAM. Or I can get super fast persistent storage with high durability but much higher cost, which basically makes it good for a persistent cache but not that much else, considering SSDs are now similarly fast even though their durability is not as good). It wasn't sunk by a stuck-in-the-mud way of thinking about memory versus disk, it was sunk because the tech never got good enough to actually achieve their ambitions.

hardware2win 3y ago
Hmm, ive seen report by fujitsu that it was fine if used with dram >Intel Optane persistent memory is blurring the line between DRAM and persistent storage for in-memory computing. Unlike DRAM, Intel Optane persistent memory retains its data if power to the server is lost or the server reboots, but it still provides *near-DRAM performance*. In SAP HANA operation this results in tangible benefits >Speeds up shutdowns, starts and restarts many times over – significantly reduce system downtime and lower operational costs  Process more data in real-time with increased memory capacity  Lower total cost of ownership by transforming the data storage hierarchy  Improve business continuity with persistent memory and fast data loads at startup https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-performance-report-primergy-inteloptane-saphane.pdf https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-perfor...
crabbone 3y ago
Where Optane could've been used: distributed storage. The whole game there is about how fast can you ack the writes while writing as far away as you can. The company I worked for in this specific area had used pmem when that was available for that specific reason. I'm no expert on costs of these things and especially wouldn't dare to predict how these costs could've behaved in the future, but my guess would be not that the technology had no use, rather that it was too expensive for what it was good at, and the second best was cheap enough to warrant choosing it over Optane.

rewmie 3y ago

> What was interesting about Optane was that it was kinda an attempt to get rid of disk and ram distinction. That might be the promise, but that premise is fundamentally flawed. I mean, what drives the need to classify memory devices is performance characteristics, and even if your starting point is this idealized world where Optane was ubiquitous then all it took was a ephemeral memory technology to significantly outperform Optane to create need support the performance-oriented non-persistent memory type.

xtracto 3y ago

I was just thinking about optane now that I'm dealing with AWS lambda cold starts. It wold be a great use for that technology to decrease function startup time .

ori_b 3y ago
The problem is that if you want to keep the server state around, there's already a cheap and easy solution: write a persistent server.