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Rest in Peace, Optane (specbranch.com)
6 points by pclmulqdq on Sept 23, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



> The NVMe drives were faster, but not that much faster, than SLC flash.

Under mixed loads they were stupendously faster, much higher throughput. Latency was 1/10th.

Thats all assuming you keep your flash drive away from any write amplification problems, which would add more orders of magnitude of benefit for optane. Being byte & not sector based radically simplified the drive controller architecture greatly & avoided all manners of users trashing thr drive performance.

The value proposition here doesnt quite speak to me. I think there is value to the persistent memory bus, but definitely: using dram slots wasnt gonna work. Sadly Intel is cancelling Optane right as the fix is coming out: CxL for attached memory, over a much more reasonable bus (effectively pcie slots), rather than consuming valuable dimms.

What a ridiculous circus of bad timing, getting cancelled right before perfect market fit emerges.


I agree with you completely on CXL. The DRAM interface and Intel's DRAM controller have so many sharp edges that really don't make sense for phase-change memory.




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