
Intel Has PCIe 4.0 Optane SSDs Ready, but Nothing to Plug Them Into - rbanffy
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-has-pcie-40-optane-ssds-ready-but-nothing-to-plug-them-in-to
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Jonnax
Would their Optane department care as long as they're selling SSDs?

What's the business dynamic of Intel like? Would they be fine with customers
using them with AMD CPUs or would they delay the product?

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DSingularity
My bet — delay.

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Newtonip
You could always plug them into an AMD based system.

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dijit
Does optane work with AMD? I was under the impression that it did not. It’s
not just another type of SSD.

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new_realist
NVMe is NVMe. Perhaps you’re thinking of Optane in a DIMM form factor?

~~~
dijit
[https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/does-optane-
really-o...](https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/does-optane-really-only-
work-on-intel-and-not-on-amd.3027390/)

Seems like it only works with Intel 7th gen and later.

Although there's a post on the LTT forums[0] exclaiming that Wendell managed
to get it working. (although he also got Thunderbolt working before on AMD)

[0]: [https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/961841-we-ran-intel-
opt...](https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/961841-we-ran-intel-optane-on-an-
amd-cpu/)

~~~
yskchu
Intel marketing is confusing; Optane is several things

There's Optane memory, which is the one the link is referring to, it needs
Intel CPUs

Then there's Optane SSDs, which works with AMD fine

Source: I'm using them on EPYC servers

Optane memory is not a traditional SSD, it's more of a disk cache, matched to
the Intel CPU. While the rest of the Optane family are standard SSDs

~~~
walrus01
This is what happens when the marketing department gives the same name to two
things which may be broadly in a general product category, but are technically
very different. Have seen it with many categories of hardware.

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Dylan16807
It's actually worse.

If you follow Intel's marketing "Optane Memory" refers to the SSDs. The Optane
DIMMs are called "Optane DC Persistent Memory".

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fgonzag
Wait, why is it worse? It perfectly describes what it is: An Optane (3DXpoint)
Persistent Memory Module. Guess the DC stands for DataCenter?

~~~
Dylan16807
That part isn't terrible, even though it is really unwieldy. The big problem
is using "Optane Memory" as the branding for the kind that _isn 't_ a memory
module.

The natural things to call them are "Optane drives" and "Optane memory". Don't
criss-cross that!

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russler23
Engineering samples are in the wild, so about as "ready" as Tiger Lake is.

~~~
hmottestad
I love how there are still no 10nm CPUs in sight for the likes of the 16”
MacBook Pro.

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random_thoughts
Intel does have Agilex FPGAs that can support upto PCIe 5.0

~~~
hobo_mark
Maybe, but they won't sell you one before several years from now.

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rjeli
try loading this page on mobile 3g/throttled lte. blank screen for a few
seconds. text loads, some kind of pop up I scroll past and read about 2
paragraphs, when the text disappears, never to return again.

~~~
gruez
And if you're on desktop, you get an autoplay video once you get to the
bottom. If you try scroll off, it turns into a sticky element.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I miss the annoying picture flashing ads of the 2000s. The amount of crapware
(also read ads) on websites nowadays is ridiculous.

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acolumb
CES starts tomorrow. I wouldn't be surprised if they released a PCIe 4-ready
chipset there.

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simcop2387
they'll need pcie 4.0 capable cpus too

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cptskippy
I haven't been paying attention to Intel Ark but I thought the CPUs talked to
the chipset over QPI and only the chipset needed to support PCIE?

~~~
simcop2387
It's apparently UPI now[1], but they'll still need to do a lot of updating to
the CPU and UPI to get the bandwidth of pci-e 4.0. Best info I can find[1]
puts pci-e 4.0 x16 at around 64GB/s, and UPI at a max of 28GB/s on their best
xeon cpus and fpgas. Having that kind of bottleneck at the chipset would make
it nearly pointless since even pci-e 3.0 with a 16x link is 32GB/s.

[1] [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-stratix-10-dx-upi-
cx...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-stratix-10-dx-upi-
cxl,40436.html)

~~~
paulmd
Chipset doesn’t run at x16 bandwidth, it gets 4 lanes of bandwidth. At least
for consumer platform, but I doubt server runs anything significant off
chipset. QPI/UPI may run faster between sockets but I don’t think chipset is a
full speed link by any means.

Nominally QPI/UPI but those protocols are not hugely distinct from PCIe in
general. AFAIK it’s basically PCIe but encrypted, so that nobody else can
replicate their chipsets (like used to happen in the old days with
nForce/etc).

Also your numbers are off, easy rule of thumb is that one PCIe 3.0 lane is one
GB/s of bandwidth per lane. So 3.0x16 is 16 GB/s of bandwidth.

So it just needs 8 GB/s of bandwidth to run at 4.0x4 speeds.

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aphextron
Are there any benchmarks available for these drives?

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ksec
They are mostly for Server / Database workload [1] and Facebook looked at
reducing Memory usage with Optane[2].

Consumer workload see little to zero measurable benefits. Once you pass a
certain Random Rd / Write speed, Seq Rd Write is still king, or likely not the
source of bottlenecked.

[1] [https://www.servethehome.com/intel-optane-hands-on-real-
worl...](https://www.servethehome.com/intel-optane-hands-on-real-world-
benchmark-and-test-results/)

[2] [https://research.fb.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/03/reducing-...](https://research.fb.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/03/reducing-dram-footprint-with-nvm-in-facebook.pdf)

~~~
vbezhenar
What about developer workloads? Like reading hundreds of tiny files during
compilation, writing thousands of tiny binary files after compilation, using
disk-baked caches for IDE. I never found tests but for me it seems likely a
scenario where Optane might help. Also things like starting a container or VM
might be improved with Optane a little bit.

~~~
pdimitar
The Optane SSDs do quite well on any random access benchmarks; they are kind
of specialised for it. For sequential access however, high-end prosumer SSDs
like the Samsung 970 Pro beat the Optanes.

~~~
Dylan16807
Random access latency is the bottleneck. You can feel the difference between
NAND and Optane even if your sequential speeds are comparable to a hard drive,
let alone the 2 gigabytes per second those drives can push.

After all, if you have to wait 100 microseconds per 4K read, a single thread
can only utilize 40 megabytes per second.

~~~
pdimitar
Agreed. I am just saying that the Optanes are specifically tuned to be the
fastest storage drives for random access -- and they deliver on that front.
There are benchmarks out there, I can send you a link if you like.

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jeanvalmarc
The Comet Lake stuff they just announced probably supports it (no details
yet):

[https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/06/intel-5ghz-comet-
lake-c...](https://www.macrumors.com/2020/01/06/intel-5ghz-comet-lake-chips/)

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fulafel
Very bad headline about a product that's not shipping and a "but" part that's
false.

Here's an intel product to plug them into already today:
[https://www.anandtech.com/show/14906/intel-ships-
stratix-10-...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/14906/intel-ships-
stratix-10-dx)

And there's also AMD x86 processors that support it.

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addicted44
The article mentions the Stratix 10.

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duelingjello
That sounds like a personal problem in need of a cold shower IYAM. _Be the
change you seek_ by getting ISVs/OEMs/ODMs to launch an orgy of compatible
hardware to simultaneous release peripherals to stick them with. Seems like an
easy enough problem to solve, as long as everything is tested beforehand.

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qeternity
If you read the article you’ll see they don’t have any CPUs on the market that
support PCIe4

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dannyw
And it's not because no one supports PCIe4: the latest AMD chips support it
just fine.

