
Kaby Lake Systems with Intel Optane SSDs Coming Soon - gbrown_
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10932/kaby-lake-systems-with-intel-optane-ssds-coming-soon
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kev009
The Optane details seem like a false start, at least for consumers. It may
have use in enterprise just due to the endurance for WALs and ZIL etc.

Performance of the NVMe Samsung 960 Pro is to the point where enterprise HHHL
cards were not much more than a year ago. These are affordable for mid-high
end notebooks, and the 960 Evo delivers close to the same amount of
performance for an actual consumer workload not running benchmarks that will
easily hit the rest of the mid range and down into low end at lower capacity.

According to Micron, there isn't much demand for large consumer SSDs. 1TB will
be held for a while as the sweet spot.

So, where do you need 16GB of cache but for HDDs? And where is an HDD actually
useful in a modern notebook? I can see people wanting a few TB in a portable
USB enclosure. But as a boot/OS drive, you really want all flash.

~~~
eloff
I'd rather a big, fast SSD than an Optane+HDD combo. An HDD in a laptop is
just yuck. But Optane does seem to out-perform the top-end PCIe enterprise
SSDs by a factor of 5-7x, at least judging by the benchmarks Intel has
published against it's own top-end SSDs.

~~~
dogma1138
It seems like they are putting those drives on x2 PCIE slots there is no way
it's going to outpace any NVME drive.

Their capacity is also very small this looks to me like 2005 when Lenovo had
SSD cache addin cards for the pc/express card slots.

Give me a 2tb drive or go him until the the 960/960 pro is all the rage.

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brudgers
One of the criticisms of the Microsoft Surface Studio a few months ago was
that it used a hybrid drive rather than a big SSD. This suggests why Microsoft
might have chosen that direction for its hardware's architectural roadmap.
It's the kind of customer that would have early access to Intel's pipeline via
_quid pro quo_.

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hedora
The use of a hard disk instead of ssd to back the Optane suggests the
performance differential between SSDs and Optane is not great enough to
justify another level in the cache hierarchy (i.e., sticking the optane in
front of an ssd doesn't measurably improve performance, or improves
performance less than adding RAM for the same cost).

Maybe they will have something more compelling (more pcie lanes or more
capacity) next year, and then they'll start backing these with cheap TLC, or
start using them for primary storage.

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ksec
Optane SSD should have latency 10 to 100x lower then even the best SSD. And
much higher QD1 throughput.

The problem is how much will this translate into real world experience. Are we
still limited by I/O?

And why HDD? It is a waste of space in laptop.

~~~
brudgers
There are still reasonable use cases for mass storage in a laptop:
photographs, video, music, etc. And there's a tradeoff of overhead and risk
with putting stuff 'in the cloud' in the form of management overhead, network
connectivity, and the evaporation of a service upon which someone depends.

Laptop minimalism is just a set of tradeoffs. A Thinkpad X-series or
Chromebook isn't for everyone. Neither are Xeons nor Atoms.

~~~
ksec
Yes, but the market for Mass Storage in a Laptop? That is even more of a
niche. My understanding is that even PROs want 1TB SSD rather then 4TB HDD.

~~~
brudgers
I used 'mass storage' to refer to the largest element of the local persistent
storage stack. In the end, what matters is not the technology but the
performance: what demanding users require is a performance level that is
currently provided by SSD's, how that is achieved doesn't matter (marketing
and faster alternatives not withstanding).

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carbocation
If Optane achieves the latency benchmarks claimed in [1], I would be happy to
use it as swap for large-scale computing. For IO-heavy tasks, it could start
to blur the decision to scale up vs scale out.

1 = [https://www.extremetech.com/computing/237817-first-intel-
opt...](https://www.extremetech.com/computing/237817-first-intel-optane-
hardware-could-be-coming-to-consumer-desktops)

~~~
rasz_pl
so you would prefer 16GB Optane drive as swap instead of ... you know, actual
16GB DIMM?

~~~
carbocation
In which universe is that a serious question?

~~~
rasz_pl
In the same one where Lenovo announces brand new Kaby Lake laptops with '16GB
Optane cache'.

~~~
carbocation
To be clear, then, I would not use a 16GB DIMM of RAM for swap. I would use
all the RAM I had as RAM.

Having something faster than an SSD for swap would be a win; hence my original
point. Specifically, if the latency is only 10x higher than RAM (as shown in
the image I linked to), then it would allow for trade offs to be made from an
engineering perspective regarding scaling up vs scaling out.

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intrasight
We should wait and see what they release before being too critical.

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blinkingled
I have little idea of how 3D XPoint works but if it is that fast and non-
volatile what prevents it from replacing RAM+Disk? Cost I presume or are there
other reasons?

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theandrewbailey
This isn't necessarily holding 3DXpoint back, but one place where RAM is more
useful is security. You don't want TLS encryption keys on a non-volatile
medium. Who knew that RAM's quickly lose contents when off property would turn
out to be a feature?

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my123
16GB SSDs are way too small to be usable in that case, especially when paired
with an HDD... They should be paired with an slower SSD.

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chx
A white ThinkPad. Kill me now. Or at least Lenovo should release the Retro to
atone for their sins.

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godmodus
me thinks it's time to start making fused CPU/RAM monster chips. Monster
CPURAM chips and PCIe SSDs! nothing else makes sense! then make it smaller -
use crystals for a 3D process! START USING BLOOD TO COOL IT AND FEED IT. CALL
IT MITTENS. ehm.. got carried a way there.

the days of an Octacore sitting at the helm of 128GB of RAM on a single die
are soon upon us, me brethren/ettes.

for the daily joe, all of this doesn't mean much really. if anything, there's
some serious improvements coming to our backbone infrastructure and laptop
industries. considering improvement in lithium, this might kill off the
desktop entirely, if done right.

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olavgg
Consumer based SSD's should be avoided. They are all a big lie when it comes
to write performance. Some SSD's are hardly faster than regular hard drives
for write operations.

[https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/filecab/2016/11/18/dont-...](https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/filecab/2016/11/18/dont-
do-it-consumer-ssd/)

~~~
sgift
The link talks about consumer SSDs and server workloads, makes a valid point
regarding those two things (don't mix them), but doesn't say anything with
regards to your comment. Also: Optane is a completely different technology.
So, what's your point?

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olavgg
Server workloads is a bad excuse. Most browsers and a lot of applications use
SQLite. Firefox and Chrome is known to write a lot more than they read.

[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung-9...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=samsung-960-evo&num=2)

~~~
Dylan16807
That's still ten to twenty times faster than a hard drive, and browsers are
not exactly slamming their history database. It's a trickle of writes, and a
consumer SSD can handle it fine.

~~~
olavgg
You are absolutely right that a consumer SSD can handle it just fine, just
like you can surf the web fine with 2GB ram and a single core CPU. But some
people pay more bucks because they want better overall performance, and it
sucks to pay for a top consumer SSD model that underperform the enterprise
models by a huge margin for some basic tasks. Almost everyone who review
consumer SSD, with a few rare exceptions, never benchmark sync write
performance / latency. Those number matters a lot more than many believe.

I've already seen to many people who use consumer drives with VMware, ZFS
Intent log, SQL servers and so on, that gets frustrated because those
applications are behaving a lot slower than what they expected and they feel
really bad when I tell them that they have been fooled to believe that they
bought "fast" SSD drives.

