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What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)
- temptemptemp111 7mo ago[dead]
- hbogert 7mo agoIt stands out, because it didn't sell. Which is weird because there were some pretty big pros about using them. The latency for updating 1 byte was crazy good. Some databases or journals for something like zfs really benefited from this.
- bombcar 7mo agoIt feels like everyone figured out what to do with them and how just about when they stopped making them.
- timschmidt 7mo agoSame for the Larabee / Knights architecture. Would sure be fun to play around with a 500 core Knights CPU with a couple TB of optane for LLM inference. Intel's got an amazing record of axing projects as soon as they've done the hard work of building an ecosystem.
- zozbot234 7mo ago> 500 core The newest fully E-core based Xeon CPUs have reached that figure by now, at least in dual-socket configs.
- timschmidt 7mo agoYup. And high end GPU compute now has on-package HBM like Knight's had a decade ago, and those new Intel CPUs are finally shipping with AVX reliably again. We lost a decade for workloads that would benefit from both.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoBut I'm surprised PCIe based CPU+RAM modules aren't a "thing" since that's basically what a GPU is if you ignore all the rather fundamental differences. Seems like it would be convenient to cheaply attach additional compute without worrying about all the other stuff. I suppose I'm just reinventing SXM at this point. The BC-250 comes close but despite the formfactor it isn't actually a PCIe card. Although if it integrated a 100 Gbit SFP slot it might actually be superior to a solution that resided in a host system. But the BC-250 is very much an anomaly as opposed to the norm.
- zozbot234 7mo agoYou need CXL to extend the cache coherency properties of actual RAM over a remote link. That's costly tech. Otherwise, you're relying on the OS (and even the compiler/basic libraries, since you need to make fences, etc. OS-visible) to paper over the differences by doing its own implementation of distributed shared memory (this is known as a 'SSI' or single-system-image approach) which has significant challenges and is closer to the spirit of setting up swap.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoI didn't mean anything like that. Just the equivalent of a GPU with the ability to run arbitrary CPU oriented programs. Of course GPUs do many tasks very well but there are also plenty of problems that aren't well suited to them. Well I suppose I've answered my own question at this point. There probably just aren't enough real world problems that aren't amenable to running on a GPU while also being either compute or memory bandwidth bound. Still the near-monoculture does strike me as odd. I guess GPUs have bifurcated into enterprise versus consumer at this point but otherwise all we've got is a single CPU example from over a decade ago and a single alternative take on the concept from Fujitsu. Is it just due to the obscene cost of masks for modern process nodes?
- akvadrako 7mo agoThings like that existed in the category of accelerator cards. Xeon Phi (Knights) is one example, focused on core count. Some from HP have soldered on SSDs too. You also had blade servers which is more focused on that use case, though that's going out of style. I don't think PCIe is really a good fit for general CPU tasks. You need big heatsinks and power and can't fit that much RAM on board.
- epistasis 7mo agoWhen most people are running databases on AWS RDS, or on ridiculous EBS drives with insanely low throughput and latency, it makes sense to me. There are very few applications that benefit from such low latency, and if one has to go off the standard path of easy, but slow and expensive and automatically backup up, people will pick the ease. Having the best technology performance is not enough to have product market fit. The execution required from the side of executives at Intel is far far beyond their capability. They developed a platform and wanted others to do the work of building all the applications. Without that starting killer app, there's not enough adoption to build an ecosystem.
- amluto 7mo ago> There are very few applications that benefit from such low latency Basically any RDBMS? MySQL and Postgres both benefit from high performance storage, but too many customers have moved into the cloud where you can’t get NVMe-like performance for durable storage for anything remotely close to a worthwhile price.
- epistasis 7mo agoI'm saying that there are very few downstream applications that use databases that benefit from reducing latency beyond the slow performance of the cloud. Running your database on VMs or baremetal gives better performance, but almost no applications built on databases bother to do it.
- p-e-w 7mo agoOptane was a victim of its own hype, such as “entirely new physics”, or “as fast as RAM, but persistent”. The reality felt like a failure afterwards even though it was still revolutionary, objectively speaking.
- zozbot234 7mo agoOptane didn't sell because they focused on their weird persistent DIMM sticks, which are a nightmare for enterprise where for many ordinary purposes you want ephemeral data that disappears as soon as you cut power. Thet should have focused on making ordinary storage and solving the interconnect bandwidth and latency problems differently, such as with more up-to-date PCIe standards.
- jauntywundrkind 7mo agoI don't think that would be my main complaint. Sticking optane in a dimm was just awkward as hell. You now have different bits of memory with very different characteristics, & you lose a ton of bandwidth. If CXL was around at the time it would have been such a nice fit, allowing for much lower latency access. It also seems like in spite of the bad fit, there were enough regular options drives, and they were indeed pretty incredible. Good endurance, reasonable price (and cheap as dirt if you consider that endurance/lifecycle cost!), some just fantastic performance figures. My conclusion is that alas there just aren't many people in the world who are serious about storage performance.
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago[flagged]
- PunchyHamster 7mo ago> and file systems built around NAND assumptions, a lot of the upside got shaved off before users ever saw it. What file systems ? Most common one you'd find would be ext4 or XFS and neither of them are
- ksec 7mo ago>Which is weird.... It isn't weird at all. I would be surprised if it ever succeed in the first place. Cost was way too high. Intel not sharing the tech with others other than Micron. Micron wasn't committed to it either, and since unused capacity at the Fab was paid by Intel regardless they dont care. No long term solution or strategy to bring cost down. Neither Intel or Micron have a vision on this. No one wanted another Intel only tech lock in. And despite the high price, it barely made any profits per unit compared to NAND and DRAM which was at the time making historic high profits. Once the NAND and DRAM cycle went down again cost / performance on Optane wasn't as attractive. Samsung even made some form of SLC NAND that performs similar to Optane but cheaper, and even they end up stopped developing for it due to lack of interest.
- jauntywundrkind 7mo agoCost was fantastically cheap, if you take into account that Optane is going to live >>10x longer than a SSD. For a lot of bulk storage, yes, you don't have frequently changing data. But for databases or caches, that are under heavy load, optane was not only far faster, but if looking at life-cycle costs, way way less.
- wtallis 7mo agoOptane was in the market during a time when the mainstream trend in the SSD industry was all about sacrificing endurance to get higher capacity. It's been several years, and I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever. The niche that could actually make use of Optane's endurance was small and shrinking, and Intel had no roadmap to significantly improve Optane's $/GB which was unquestionably the technology's biggest weakness.
- raron 7mo ago> I'm not seeing a lot of regrets from folks who moved to TLC and QLC NAND, and those products are more popular than ever. That's interesting. Even TLC has huge limitations, but QLC is basically useless unless you use it as write-once-read-many memory. I wish I have bought a lot of SSDs when you could still buy MLC ones.
- cogman10 7mo agoIMO, the reason they didn't sell is the ideal usage for them is pairing them with some slow spinning disks. The issue Optane had is that SSD capacity grew dramatically while the price plummeted. The difference between Optane and SSDs was too small. Especially since the M.2 standard proliferated and SSDs took advantage of PCI-E performance. I believe Optane retained a performance advantage (and I think even today it's still faster than the best SSDs) but SSDs remain good enough and fast enough while being a lot cheaper. The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS.
- zozbot234 7mo agoThat may have been the ideal usage back in the day, but ideal usage now is just for setting up swap. Write-heavy workloads are king with Optane, and threshing to swap is the prototypical example of something that's so write-heavy it's a terrible fit for NAND. Optane might not have been "as fast as DRAM" but it was plenty close enough to be fit for purpose.
- mort96 7mo agoThat would be fine if I could put it in an M.2 slot. But all my computers already have RAM in their RAM slots, and even if I had a spare RAM slot, I don't know that I'd trust the software stack to treat one RAM slot as a drive... And their whole deal was making RAM persistent anyway, which isn't exactly what I want.
- amluto 7mo agoIntel did a spectacularly poor job with the ecosystem around the memory cells. They made two plays, and both were flops. 1. “Optane” in DIMM form factor. This targeted (I think) two markets. First, use as slower but cheaper and higher density volatile RAM. There was actual demand — various caching workloads, for example, wanted hundreds of GB or even multiple TB in one server, and Optane was a route to get there. But the machines and DIMMs never really became available. Then there was the idea of using Optane DIMMs as persistent storage. This was always tricky because the DDR interface wasn’t meant for this, and Intel also seems to have a lot of legacy tech in the way (their caching system and memory controller) and, for whatever reason, they seem to be barely capable of improving their own technology. They had multiple serious false starts in the space (a power-supply-early-warning scheme using NMI or MCE to idle the system, a horrible platform-specific register to poke to ask the memory controller to kindly flush itself, and the stillborn PCOMMIT instruction). 2. Very nice NVMe devices. I think this was more of a failure of marketing. If they had marketed a line of SSDs that, coupled with an appropriate filesystem, could give 99% fsync latency of 5 microseconds and they had marketed this, I bet people would have paid. But they did nothing of the sort — instead they just threw around the term “Optane” inconsistently. These days one could build a PCM-backed CXL-connected memory mapped drive, and the performance might be awesome. Heck, I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to get a GPU to stream weights directly off such a device at NVLink-like speeds. Maybe Intel should try it.
- orion138 7mo agoOne of the many problems was trying to limit the use of Optane to Intel devices. They should have manufactured and sold Optane memory and let other players build on top of it at a low level.
- amluto 7mo ago> Optane memory Which “Optane memory”? The NVMe product always worked on non-Intel. The NVDIMM products that I played with only ever worked on a very small set of rather specialized Intel platforms. I bet AMD could have supported them about as easily as Intel, and Intel barely ever managed to support them.
- thesz 7mo agoIn "databases and journals" you rarely update just one byte, you do a transaction that updates data, several indexes and metadata. All of that needs to be atomic. Power failure can happen in between any of "1 byte updates with crazy latencies." However small latency is, power failure is still faster. Usually, there is a write ahead or some other log that alleviates the problem, this log is usually written in streaming fashion. What is good, though, is that "blast radius" [1] of failure is smaller than usual - failed one byte write rarely corrupts more that one byte or cache line. SQLite has to deal with 512 (and even more) bytes long possible corruptions on most disks, with Optane it is not necessarily so. So, less data to copy, scan, etc. [1] https://sqlite.org/psow.html https://sqlite.org/psow.html
- PunchyHamster 7mo agoIt's not. You won't be writing one byte, ever (even if you had layers that actually supported less-than-block writes), because the overhead of instruction would be massive and you'd be murdering both latency and bandwidth for anything non-trivial
- tbrownaw 7mo ago> However small latency is, power failure is still faster. A fancy switching power supply with a friendly power factor (looks like a resistive load, rather than drawing more amps during the lower voltage parts of the waveform) actually will have non-zero fall time when suddenly unplugged.
- mort96 7mo agoI never understood what they're meant to do. Intel seemed to picture some future where RAM is persistent; but they were never close to fast enough to replace RAM, and the option to reboot in order to fix some weird state your system has gotten itself into is a feature of computers, not a problem to work around.
- trentnelson 7mo agoWhen the PDIMMs were used with an appropriate file system + kernel, it was pretty cool. NTFS + DAX + kernel support yielded a file system where mmap’ing didn’t page fault. No page faults because the file content is already there, instantly. So if you had mmap heavy read/write workloads… you could do some pretty cool stuff.
- ashvardanian 7mo agoI don't have the inside scoop on Intel's current mess, but they definitely have a habit of killing off their coolest projects.
- brcmthrowaway 7mo agoRealsense too
- walterbell 7mo agoRelated: "High-bandwidth flash progress and future" (15 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46700384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46700384 In an era of RAM shortages and quarterly price increases, Optane remains viable for swap and CPU/GPU cache.
- trollbridge 7mo agoYeah, I've wondered if we might see a revival of this kind of technology.
- newsclues 7mo agoin an era of shortages, if there was an optane factory today ready to print money...
- walterbell 7mo agoSecondary market surplus pricing (~$1/GB) value accrues to the buyer..
- zozbot234 7mo ago> (~$1/GB) Isn't that actually crazy good, even insane value for the performance and DWPD you get with Optane, especially with DRAM being ~$15/GB or so? I don't think ~$1/GB NAND is anywhere that good on durability, even if the raw performance is quite possibly higher.
- Weryj 7mo agoI’ve been considering buying 8x64g models and setting them as equal priority swap disks (to mitigate the low throughput) for this exact reason.
- MrDrMcCoy 7mo agoCan confirm doing so is awesome. Get some slightly bigger ones and partition them for additional use as zil. They're extremely satisfying to use, and depressing to remember that we'll never see their like again.
- amelius 7mo agoFor a good technical explanation at the physical level of a memory cell: https://pcper.com/2017/06/how-3d-xpoint-phase-change-memory-works/ https://pcper.com/2017/06/how-3d-xpoint-phase-change-memory-...
- FpUser 7mo agoI feel sorry about the situation. From my perspective Optane was a godsend for databases. I was contemplating building a system. Could've been a pinnacle of vertical scalability for cheap.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- ece 7mo agoFabs are expensive and all, but maybe running a right-sized fab could have still been profitable at making optane for low-latency work that it was so good at. Even moreso with RAM prices as they are.
- downrightmike 7mo agoPE popped already, now Private credit is already popping, having been in too many bubbles, Datacenter bubble popped them. The whole system just isn't talking about it because the media isn't doing their job to report. There are no more good loans to make, the ROI is nil and the interest rate is spot plus 5.5%, and businesses don't want to pay 10% interest on a loan. We're ina zombie cycle
- dangoodmanUT 7mo agoOptane was crazy good tech, it way just too expensive at the time for mass adoption, but the benefits were so good. Looking at those charts, besides the DWPD it feels like normal NVMe has mostly caught up. I occassionally wonder where a gen 7/8(?) optane would be today if it caught on, it'd probably be nuts.
- zozbot234 7mo ago> besides the DWPD it feels like normal NVMe has mostly caught up. So what you mean is that on the most important metric of them all for many workloads, Flash-based NVMe has not caught up at all. When you run a write heavy workload on storage with a limited DWPD (including heavy swapping from RAM) higher performance actually hurts your durability.
- exmadscientist 7mo agoThe actual strength of Optane was on mixed workloads. It's hard to write a flash cell (read-erase-write cycle, higher program voltage, settling time, et cetera). Optane didn't have any of that baggage. This showed up as amazing numbers on a 50%-read, 50%-write mix. Which, guess what, a lot of real workloads have, but benchmarks don't often cover well. This is why it's a great OS boot drive: there's so much cruddy logging going on (writes) at the same time as reads to actually load the OS. So Optane was king there.
- lvl155 7mo agoIt’s the best OS drive especially p5800x.
- gozzoo 7mo agoMaybe we can also mention the HP Memristor here.
- jamiek88 7mo agoOh I was so excited for that. I devoured any news or blogs or rumours about that immediately!
- readitalready 7mo agoThese are absolute beasts for database servers, and definitely needs to make a comeback. They suck for large sequential file access, but incredible for small random access: databases.
- gigatexal 7mo agoI’m still sad they discontinued them. What’s the alternative now does anything come close?
- walterbell 7mo agoSmall sizes are on secondary market for ~$1/GB.
- zozbot234 7mo agoWhich is a bargain compared to what DRAM costs today. If you just include the bare minimum of DRAM for a successful boot and immediately set up the entire "small" Optane drive as swap, that's a viable workstation-class system for comparative peanuts. You can't do this with NAND because the write workload of swap kills the media (I suppose it becomes viable if you monitor SMART wearout indicators and heavily overprovision the storage to leverage the drive's pSLC mode, but you're still treating $~0.10/GB hardware as a consumable and that will cost you) and of course you can't do it with spinning rust because the media is too slow.
- rkagerer 7mo agoMy understanding is Optane is still unbeaten when it comes to latency. Has anyone examined its use as an OS volume, compared to today's leading SSD's? I know the throughput won't be as high, but in my experience that's not as important to how responsive your machine feels as latency.
- rkagerer 7mo agoBefore people claim it doesn't matter due to OS write buffering, I should point out a) today's bloated software and the many-layered, abstracted I/O stack it's built on tends to issue lots of unnecessary flushes, b) read latency is just as important as write (if not moreso) to how responsive your OS feels, particularly if the whole thing doesn't fit in (or preload to) memory.
- speedgoose 7mo agoI configured a hetzner ax101 bare metal server with a 480GB 3d xpoint ssd some years ago. It’s used as the boot volume and it seems fast despite the server being heavily over provisioned, but I can’t really compare because I don’t have a baseline without.
- hamdingers 7mo ago> Has anyone examined its use as an OS volume, compared to today's leading SSD's? Late last year I switched from a 1.5tb Optane 905P to a 4tb WD Blue SN5000 NVMe drive in a gaming machine and saw improved load times, which makes sense given the read and write speeds are ~double. No observable difference otherwise. I'm sure that's not the use case you were looking for. I could probably tease out the difference in latency with benchmarks but that's not how I use the computer. The 905P is now in service as an SSD cache for a large media server and that came with a big performance boost but the baseline I'm comparing to is just spinning drives.
- rkagerer 7mo agoThanks, that's helpful real-world feedback (not that I wouldn't also be interested in some synthetic benchmark comparisons from someone else).
- pgwalsh 7mo agoSure, they were expensive but they have great endurance and sustained read and write speeds. I use one in my car for camera recordings. I had gone through several other drives but this one has been going on 3 or 4 years now without issue. I have a couple more in use too. It's a shame this tech is going away because it's excellent.
- exmadscientist 7mo agoAround the time of Optane's discontinuation, the rumor mill was saying that the real reason it got the axe was that it couldn't be shrunk any, so its costs would never go down. Does anyone know if that's true? I never heard anything solid, but it made a lot of sense given what we know about Optane's fab process. And if no shrink was possible, is that because it was (a) possible but too hard; (b) known blocks to a die shrink; or (c) execs didn't want to pay to find out?
- zozbot234 7mo agoThat's at least physically half-plausible, but it would be a terrible reason if true. 3.5 in. format hard drives can't be shrunk any, and their costs are correspondingly high, but they still sell - newer versions of NVMe even provide support for them. Same for LTO tape cartridges. Perhaps they expected other persistent-memory technologies to ultimately do better, but we haven't really seen this. Worth noting though that Optane is also power-hungry for writes compared to NAND. Even when it was current, people noticed this. It's a blocker for many otherwise-plausible use cases, especially re: modern large-scale AI where power is a key consideration.
- wtallis 7mo ago> 3.5 in. format hard drives can't be shrunk any, You're looking at the entirely wrong kind of shrinking. Hard drives are still (gradually) improving storage density: the physical size of a byte on a platter does go down over time. Optane's memory cells had little or no room for shrinking, and Optane lacked 3D NAND's ability to add more layers with only a small cost increase.
- hedora 7mo agoI think it was killed primarily because the DIMM version had a terrible programming API. There was no way to pin a cache line, update it and flush, so no existing database buffer pool algorithms were compatible with it. Some academic work tried to address this, but I don’t know of any products. The SSD form factor wasn’t any faster at writes than NAND + capacitor-backed power loss protection. The read path was faster, but only in time to first byte. NAND had comparable / better throughput. I forget where the cutoff was, but I think it was less than 4-16KB, which are typical database read sizes. So, the DIMMs were unprogrammable, and the SSDs had a “sometimes faster, but it depends” performance story.
- rkagerer 7mo agoDid anyone ever see retention issues like this guy reported on one of his older models? https://goughlui.com/2024/07/28/tech-flashback-intel-optane-3d-xpoint-memory/ https://goughlui.com/2024/07/28/tech-flashback-intel-optane-...
- zozbot234 7mo agoThat's data retention issues on the very first read-through of the media after sitting in cold storage for many years, with subsequent performance returning to normal. It's definitely something to be aware of (and kudos to the blog poster for running that experiment) but worn-out NAND will behave a lot worse than that.
- userbinator 7mo agoRetention issues with completely new Optane is not great compared to SLC NAND, which Optane was supposed to beat. I have USB drives with the latter, probably a few dozen cycles at most, yet they have had no problems keeping data intact for over a decade.
- zozbot234 7mo agoThat's not completely new, it's just new old stock. That's the whole point of why the blogger ran that experiment.
- userbinator 7mo agoPerhaps "unworn" would be a better way to phrase it, as it had zero program/erase cycles. Even unworn NAND flash has better retention than that.
- twotwotwo 7mo agoOne potential application I briefly had hope for was really good power loss protection in front of a conventional Flash SSD. You only need a little compared to the overall SSD capacity to be able to correctly report the write was persisted, and it's always running, so there's less of a 'will PLP work when we really need it?' question. (Maybe there's some use as a read cache too? Host RAM's probably better for that, though.) It's going to be rewritten lots of times, but it's supposed to be ready for that. It seems like there's a very small window, commercially, for new persistent memories. Flash throughput scales really cost-efficiently, and a lot is already built around dealing with the tens-of-microseconds latencies (or worse--networked block storage!). Read latencies you can cache your way out of, and writers can either accept commit latency or play it a little fast and loose (count a replicated write as safe enough or...just not be safe). You have to improve on Flash by enough to make it worth the leap while remaining cheaper than other approaches to the same problem, and you have to be confident enough in pulling it off to invest a ton up front. Not easy!
- zozbot234 7mo ago> It seems like there's a very small window, commercially, for new persistent memories. Flash throughput scales really cost-efficiently Flash is no bueno for write-heavy workloads, and the random-access R/W performance is meh compared to Optane. MLC and SLC have better durability and performance, but still very mid.
- hedora 7mo agoAny decent SSD has capacitor (enterprise) or battery backed (phones) DRAM. Therefore, a sync write is just “copy the data to an I/O buffer over PCIe”. For databases, where you do lots of small scattered writes, and lots of small overwrites to the tail of the log, modern SSDs coalesce writes in that buffer, greatly reducing write wear, and allowing the effective write bandwidth to exceed the media write bandwidth. These schemes are much less expensive than optane.
- olavgg 7mo agoI have tried multiple enterprise SSD's, for sync writes. Nothing comes close to Optane Dimm, even Optane NVMe is 10x slower than PDIMMS. https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/so-i-tested-intel-optane-persistent-memory-for-my-first-time.50579/ https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/so-i-teste...
- myself248 7mo agoMy kingdom for a MicroSD card with Optane inside. My dashcam wants it soooo badly.
- throwaway270925 7mo agoIts not Optane but there are SLC microSD cards!
- myself248 7mo agoI have a few of them, and yes, they're worth every penny! (For posterity: Mouser and Digikey et alia carry these things and let you search/filter by cell type. They're not cheap.)
- bluedino 7mo agoNow do Intel's HBM/CPU Max
- ritcgab 7mo agoAll those nice numbers are just beaten by the unit cost. And the ecosystem is a mess.
- jccx70 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Havoc 7mo agoI've got a bunch of them in my homelab. They're good if applied to tasks that leverage their attributes.
- cbsmith 7mo agoSurprised Optane wasn't kept on life support by hyperscalers and kicked in to overdrive as the demand for AI memory spiked.
- watersb 7mo agoI use two Intel 905 SSDs as mirrored cache devices for ZFS.
- dehrmann 7mo agoWhy would you mirror a cache device?
- watersb 7mo agoI think a read cache device gets set up like RAID0, interleaved reads rather than redundant data. Examples of auxiliary devices where you want redundancy: there can be a write cache (the ZFS Intent Log, or ZIL). You can also dedicate a fast device for hot items like the deduplication tables, or a dedicated device for tiny files where data can be stored directly in the directory data, rather than allocating a separate data block.
- sombragris 7mo agoI think a factor in Optane's demise was dishonesty on the part of low-end laptop manufacturers. You were a poor student looking for an entry-level cheap laptop and saw a lot of models with 4GB [RAM] "memory" and suddenly there was this one model with "20 GB memory" for the same price. Seemed attractive to the regular guy, but this in fact was 4GB RAM + 16 GB Optane non-volatile storage (and maybe a paltry 32 GB SSD for the rest). Optane would be treated as a drive for storing the Windows OS. That conflation of Optane storage as "memory", hinting that this was equal to RAM, turned many people against it once they fell victims to that bait-and-switch.
- simulator5g 7mo agoI never bought one because I only saw Optane in these low spec configurations. I didn't see any use for a tiny SSD. I only learned more about it after it was discontinued.
- dehrmann 7mo agoI wish it had made it to thumb drives for its superior data retention. It doesn't work by holding a charge; it's phase-change, so it retains data longer.
- vbezhenar 7mo agoI encountered FRAM chips in one PCB I worked with. It's like flash, but holds data forever and does not wear. One could easily create usb drive of small capacity using these chips. They are a bit expensive, but that longevity could be a market differentiator. So tech is there if you think you can sell it.
- ggm 7mo agoDid it ever have real input costs which justified its pricing or was it totally a synthetic price to cover an imagined value above base, and some IPR? I may be wrong, but I tend to think the fab cost has very little to do with the complexity, but not nothing, and the outcome cost is very unrelated to price at a viable yield. If optane failed, it was probably because Intel didn't like the economics of pricing it to succeed.
- Synaesthesia 7mo agoI still think it has a lot of potential, and is the logical next storage system, because of its performance advantages over NAND flash. Because input costs can come down.
- ggm 7mo ago"here's one I prepared earlier" would be cute. I think other people's threads pointing out to scale globally it has to be something anyone can do, and right now Intel appear to have set the RAND conditions or whatever IPR they lock into this higher than other people want to pay.
- whatever1 7mo agoIs there any alternative today? I benched my brand new pcie5 ssd today and while it does over 10GB/s sequential data for random small chunks it barely exceeds 70MB/s. Meanwhile Optane was 5 times faster than that.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rldjbpin 7mo agothe tech had so much potential, but it was during the era when Intel dominated. other than the pcie add-in cards that can act has fast cache, all the major use cases were down to their whims. platform support (or the lack thereof) killed it before it could be realized. too bad there was no apple moment (e.g. with thunderbolt) where a third-party was allowed to make it more widespread.