
Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance - Foggydog
http://www.computerworld.com/article/3082658/data-storage/intel-lets-slip-roadmap-for-optane-ssds-with-1000x-performance.html
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Lionleaf
"Supporting filesystems in persistent memory" (2014)

[https://lwn.net/Articles/610174/](https://lwn.net/Articles/610174/)

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kriro
How do contracts with laptop producers usually work? Could they ship in
consumer hardware by the end of the year if that's the stated availability or
does it usually take longer? What are the chances that the Apple flagship
(MBP) timing will be synched with this technology will be available (possibly
as an option only, no idea if the pricepoint is prohibitive)?

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snorrah
Ah, interesting, it seemed as if it wasn't going to be competing with current
ssd's in terms of capacity, but the last part of the article mentions 10x the
capacity of nand and so over a terabyte on an M.2 drive. Assuming price might
be quite high, it seems like it'll be a full upgrade over nand ssd's.

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ClassyPuff
gjulianm 20 hours ago

I'm curious, why do you say that the open/read/write model can't work? I
suppose that current software should be optimized to take advantage of better
performance, that is what really is.

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baq
so if you solder this accelerator onto a motherboard and make it a few times
larger than your RAM, you get a super-low-latency L5-ish cache (where RAM is
L4-ish) and, potentially, an ability to instantenously suspend and keep
suspended without consuming any power at all, assuming RAM is mostly in the
Optane cache at all times. sounds nice.

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acqq
If it still suffers from the limited number of the write cycles, if it's even
a few orders of magnitude more it still can't be used instead of RAM, but
still just instead of the disk.

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hellabites
They claim that it has an unlimited number of write cycles.

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gumby
No discussion of power in the fluffy article; perhaps there was some in the
youtube preso but it's impossible to search or skim that. This would
definitely be a game changer if they can really ship it that quickly. It's
funny that a SVP talked about notebooks rather than phones or servers, where
this could possibly be more effective. That shows where Intel's head is,
unfortunately.

I wonder how it compares to the memristor, which also has a sub 90 ns
switching time and pretty low power. Optane blows that out of the water, if
it's not vaporware.

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imtringued
SSDs consume too much power for phones. That shows that intel doesn't believe
in the $15 revenue per phone hype. Unless you are the manufacturer of the
entire phone you won't see a worthwile amount of money coming your way.

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Synaesthesia
Modern phones have very fast ssd's. Eg the iPhone 6S and Galaxy S6 have
desktop class storage. [http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-
iphone-6s-and-i...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-
iphone-6s-and-iphone-6s-plus-review/7)

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andrepd
1000x performance? 1000x relative to what? What's the actual figure we're
looking at?

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Guvante
Seek time, there is a picture showing the seek times of different tech.

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andrepd
Only orders of magnitude.

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imperialdrive
I just love this stuff! Storage minded for 20 years... all other tech aside,
storage is what gets me up until sunrise researching... if 2017 sees this kind
of tech, I'll be smitten :-D

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nashashmi
Won't there come a time when 1000x speed increase will still be slow?

The applications will mostly be on heavy data side like medical research and
weather patterns, but it could also involve 3D photogrammetry taking in a
trillion points.

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brixon
Yes, but storage speeds and battery life are the two biggest pain points for
computers. Non-Multi-threading applications are starting to become a pain
point.

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conistonwater
Is this the same thing as this talk?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXurTRtmfWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXurTRtmfWc)

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k_lander
That was a great talk. Thanks.

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bluecalm
So your run of the mill SSD these days is like 500MB/s. Dual channel RAM @
1600Mhz with 64bit bus is: 2 * 8bytes * 1 600 000 000 = 25.6GB/sec

500MB 1000x faster would be 500GB/sec or about 20x faster than standard RAM.

That puts the claim in perspective :)

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1024core
You're talking throughput. They're talking latency.

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bluecalm
Yeah, I had a blind spot here. It's just throughput is all that matters for
things I am doing so it didn't occur to me "performance" claims might about
latency. Thanks for pointing that out.

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mtgx
The 1,000x speed is so ridiculously misleading. It's basically comparing it to
the slowest microSD on Earth...from a few years ago. I doubt the speed will be
more than a few times faster than the current fastest NVMe SSDs (if that), and
it will probably be even more expensive per Gbps (and per GB, too) than SSDs
are. But it could still find some success in niche markets initially, if it
has much better endurance and other features that may be interesting to some
enterprise customers.

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MustardTiger
No it is not, it is comparing latency, like it clearly shows in the chart.

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erik
1,000x performance, but they are introducing it with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface?
That is suspicious. And then they are going to follow with a lower cost PCIe
3.0 x2 version? (That they still label as an Enthusiast / Workstation
product?) I wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market so that you
have to pay a lot for the "enterprise" product to get the full performance.
Or, alternatively, if the real world performance is nowhere near the 1000x
they keep talking about.

I wonder if they will position these as replacements for you SSD, or if they
are going to pitch them as a caching layer they way they dabbled in hybrid
SSD/HDD approaches.

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olavgg
Basically on a PCIe 3.0 x4 maximum performance is 4000GB/s, in practice this
is 3200-3500MB/s. With 4k random write, you will get maximum 800.000 to
875.000 iops per second. Consumer-grade SSD's barely manage to write 500-1000
iops when sending the ATA_CMD_FLUSH command unless they are lying which is
really bad.

Good read about consumer SSD performance: [http://www.sebastien-
han.fr/blog/2014/10/10/ceph-how-to-test...](http://www.sebastien-
han.fr/blog/2014/10/10/ceph-how-to-test-if-your-ssd-is-suitable-as-a-journal-
device/)

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daveguy
nitpick: iops is I/O operations per second. iops per second is redundant --
would be like FLOPS per second.

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johnm1019
and I still use ATM machines....

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batmansmk
This will change deeply how we make desktop applications, as well as database
management systems.

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spitfire
IBM AS/400 did this decades ago. It has a unified address space - you only see
"space" not disk/ram split.

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PeCaN
AS/400 still exists actually, under the name IBM i. I know a person who swears
by them. It's a fascinating system. There are no files, only persistent
objects living in a 128-bit address space. Downside: still uses EBCDIC….

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nashashmi
If SSDs and RAM reach the same speeds, could RAM become obsolete? If so,
architecture of computers will change drastically.

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loeg
If 3d Xpoint is cheaper, lower latency, and higher throughput than DRAM, yes,
it will obsolete DRAM. Currently it is higher latency, and lower throughput.
And it is cheaper on a per-GB basis, but with a much higher minimum GB (like,
128GB).

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toomuchtodo
DRAM doesn't wear though. Depending on your use case, you might not care if
RAM is ephemeral. It just needs to be _fast_.

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loeg
Yes, that's true (wear). Still, if 3d xpoint is durable enough and cheap/fast,
it goes a long way towards obsoleting DRAM.

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nneonneo
To be perfectly clear: the 1000x claim isn't about _throughput_ , but
_latency_. The graph in the article makes this clear: spinning drives have
latencies on the order of 10ms, NAND flash about 10us, and DRAM about 1ns. The
claim is that Optane will achieve latencies on the order of 10ns, or 1000x
better than NAND.

The on-stage benchmark shows a write throughput of about 2GB/s, which is a
much more modest improvement over the 500MB/s of a modern consumer SSD (and
perfectly within reason for a PCI x2 interface).

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Koromix
Consumer OS I/O software stacks are completely unable to deal with this. It
was fine for spinning drive latency, it's okay(ish) for high-performance SSD
but the open/read/write model just cannot work that fast. It's several orders
of magnitude off.

Assuming we keep the file system model, I'm guessing some kind of direct
memory mapping is in order? Anyone knows what's ahead of us on the software
side, to take advantage of this kind of latency?

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nneonneo
This is a great question. One way I imagine it:

Short term, the disk controller becomes a peripheral on the memory bus. On a
64-bit x86-64 system, the top 16 bits of the address are either 0000 or ffff
for RAM. Make it so that the prefix 1000 (for example) maps to the disk, so
accessing (physical) address 1000000013371000 accesses byte 13371000 on the
disk.

Now processes can just ask the OS to perform a physical memory mapping to
obtain a range of virtual addresses directly backed by disk pages, with page
protections set based on their filesystem permissions. Such physical address
mapping interfaces already exists in most OSes to support memory mapped I/O
(for example, mapping /dev/mem in Linux).

This addressing scheme has another advantage: other devices on the system can
use e.g. DMA to directly talk to the disk without any CPU intervention. For
example, the GPU could load textures straight off of disk, just like John
Carmack wants.

Medium term, we start rethinking the filesystem. If we make the address range
for a given disk completely persistent, we can just put pointers to disk bytes
on the disk itself. Processes will use the same virtual addresses as the
physical addresses when talking to the disk. Suddenly "serialization" to disk
is no longer required: data structures can be stored in native form directly
on the disk. Imagine having a "dmalloc" function call hand you a chunk of
persistent storage which you treat the same as any memory, but which can
outlive the process. Similar concepts exist in some languages (like MUMPS),
and now we bring the idea to all programming environments.

Long term, RAM ceases to be an independent entity, and merely becomes OS-
managed cache for the big persistent storage (assuming it still has any
latency/bandwidth advantages by this point). Now you can get rid of the notion
of "shutting down" or "starting up" the system: everything is persistent.
Without having to constantly refresh DRAM to keep the system alive, devices
can "sleep/hibernate" more frequently and readily, saving significant power.
Programming models become nearly unrecognizable as old models of memory
management and process lifetimes give way to new models of persistent storage
management and eternal services.

We're not far off from seeing a potential revolution in computing here.

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imtringued
>Suddenly "serialization" to disk is no longer required

That's not true. You'd still want excel to just save your sheets as xls file
and show it to a coworker as opposed to sharing the entire excel program
state. Upgrading from one version to another also requires a stable persistent
data format for things such as configurations.

Not to mention that you still need serialization to communicate over a
network.

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nneonneo
Yes, you're definitely right - "serialization" as a concept is going to still
be needed for data interchange. I just didn't want to mention it because
that's just status quo, not part of the new computing model.

In my original comment, I simply meant that you would no longer have to
serialize your data to your own disk.

