Discussion Optane Client product current and future

[thor23]

I get 160mb/s 1t1q 4k on my 16Gb optane module and it's very noticable in boot up, and in general os responsiveness compared to a 30mb/s sata 3 ssd.

 

[IntelUser2000]

I can't be certain whether that's due to the Q1T1 4K advantages, or due to other often not mentioned advantages Optane brings based on the numerous benchmarks and user experiences I've read about.

It's possible, but its on the diminishing returns side.

Benchmarks have to be simple enough, so often it masks details that otherwise exist. Optane doesn't get "dirty" while NAND SSDs do. Performance stays the same with Optane whether its full or empty while its not true for NAND. If you do large file deletes, even 970 Pro can stutter while Optane isn't affected. Optane can do simultaneous read and writes without performance reduction while NAND does(even the super low latency NAND like Z-NAND).

 

[nosirrahx]

The numbers look nice. Do you actually notice a difference in things you do?

Launching apps feels like you are relaunching them from RAM and installing software feels impossibly fast.

I am running multiple VMs on this system as well (dedicated safe and surf VMs) and they run like they are on real hardware. Rebooting a Windows 10 VM takes 10 seconds.

 

[nosirrahx]

M15 and 815P have been canceled:

815P or M15 118-120GB size? where to buy

these two SKUs were found on intel's website on their product list .pdf file. SSDPEK1F118GA01 <- 118GB 815P MEMPEK1F064GA01 <- 64GB M15 where can we purchase the 118G 815P?

forums.intel.com

 

[IntelUser2000]

M15 and 815P have been canceled:

That's interesting. Thanks for the find. I thought the M15 was released at least because it was mentioned alongside the M10 in datasheets.

And it looks like laptops have resorted to using Optane Memory H10 with Solid State Drive instead. I've seen quite a few laptops with it now, including the HP Elite Dragonfly.

 

[nosirrahx]

That's interesting. Thanks for the find. I thought the M15 was released at least because it was mentioned alongside the M10 in datasheets.

And it looks like laptops have resorted to using Optane Memory H10 with Solid State Drive instead. I've seen quite a few laptops with it now, including the HP Elite Dragonfly.

The M15 was briefly available at Tigerdirect, I tried to order 2. Shortly after my order the status was changed to back order. I got an email asking if I wanted to cancel my order and I told them I would wait, there has been no update for a week or so.

Intel does list the M15 as launched so who know what the hell is actually going on:

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ark.intel.com

Maybe they mean that the consumer M15 is canceled but it may show up integrated into laptops?

 

[Billy Tallis]

I reached out to Intel yesterday for an update on the M15 and 815P. But in the meantime, based on that forum response I'm guessing neither ever shipped beyond perhaps some very limited sampling, and I'm not even sure if we've seen a real photo of the hardware.

 

[nosirrahx]

I reached out to Intel yesterday for an update on the M15 and 815P. But in the meantime, based on that forum response I'm guessing neither ever shipped beyond perhaps some very limited sampling, and I'm not even sure if we've seen a real photo of the hardware.

With what happened with 10nm and AMD I suspect that Intel is in "dev up a killer CPU" mode right now. I totally get looking at consumer space Optane as something to be put on the back burner, maybe for good.

They should come out with a PCIe gen 4 915P so they could at least make $ off the flood of people with PCIe gen 4 AMD boards ;P

 

[IntelUser2000]

With what happened with 10nm and AMD I suspect that Intel is in "dev up a killer CPU" mode right now. I totally get looking at consumer space Optane as something to be put on the back burner, maybe for good.

Last year they were saying "1 million Optane Memory units selling per quarter".

Right then and there I knew it didn't look too good. Then the NAND flash price drops happened. With how cheap the SSDs are right now there's no market for accelerators anymore.

Perhaps for a smaller company it would make sense, but a company like Intel wouldn't dedicate all the resources and fab space to sell maybe $100 million worth a year. Honestly even the SSDs don't look that good.

 

[biostud]

Would it make sense to make an optane cache as part of a chiplet cpu?

 

[nosirrahx]

Would it make sense to make an optane cache as part of a chiplet cpu?

IMO it would add too much to the price of the chip. Perhaps if Intel would commit to longer lived sockets Optane could be integrated into the chipset as a universal storage buffer.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Would it make sense to make an optane cache as part of a chiplet cpu?

No, it would sacrifice flexibility while not bringing any performance advantages. The die is also quite large at 200mm2 so it would make the combo quite a bit more expensive. The media is perfect for the DIMM slots.

 

[nosirrahx]

No, it would sacrifice flexibility while not bringing any performance advantages. The die is also quite large at 200mm2 so it would make the combo quite a bit more expensive. The media is perfect for the DIMM slots.

Makes me wonder if X399 platforms will get support? I am pretty sure X299 could but I do not expect anything other than hacked BIOS to expose that possibility. I use hacked BIOS on my X299 Apex board to pick which microcode and which modules are installed, makes me wish that was an option of every system I have.

 

[nosirrahx]

It seems that the M15 and 815P made it quite far before they got killed. Both are mentioned here as being officially vetted for NVMe:

NVMe™ Integrator's List

The NVMe Integrator's List (IL) contains useful information about NVMe Products

www.iol.unh.edu

 

[IntelUser2000]

Makes me wonder if X399 platforms will get support?

You mean Optane DIMMs on X499(because AMD took the X399 name)?

Maybe.

There's no reason for X299 to support it unless X299 also supports Cascade Lake-X, as you need hardware bits on the CPU to get Optane PMMs to work. It's almost like DDR4, but not quite. By the DDR5 generation it should have full compatibility with DRAM. What would be the point of supporting it on X299 if the CPU can't support it?

 

[IntelUser2000]

Juicy news from Anandtech about future of Optane: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14903/intel-shares-new-optane-and-3d-nand-roadmap

Alder Stream is the successor to Cold Stream(P4800X). Looks like we might see 4-5GB/s transfer rates. Must be based on PCI Express 4.0.

Client memory acceleration seems to be cancelled.

Also says high-end workstation is coming with DC PMMs. Yes there is a slight possibility we might see Cascade Lake-X supporting it.

Article also says:

but the performance data Intel has shared so far doesn't require more than the current generation's PCIe 3 x4 interface

I disagree. The real world specs of the PCIe 3 x4 SSDs are limited to 3.5GB/s transfer rate, and often less. You can see the rapid increase in latency as it gets close to that limit. 3.2GB/s with Alder Stream isn't even touching it. I can see the read speeds easily exceeding 4GB/s limit(which in practice is past gen 3 levels) and going to 5GB/s.

In the long run, Intel is working with Microsoft to lay the groundwork for persistent memory support in client editions of Windows, but Intel isn't ready to make specific promises about bringing persistent memory support to their consumer hardware platforms.

Yes. This is what needs to happen. It could be as simple as adding an option of Suspend-to-RAM being applied to DIMMs. Then you'd have true instantaneous boot PCs.

Even average Joes will realize the benefits of such systems. Then over the coming years, application support can happen for the App Direct mode.

 

[Billy Tallis]

I disagree. The real world specs of the PCIe 3 x4 SSDs are limited to 3.5GB/s transfer rate, and often less. You can see the rapid increase in latency as it gets close to that limit. 3.2GB/s with Alder Stream isn't even touching it. I can see the read speeds easily exceeding 4GB/s limit(which in practice is past gen 3 levels) and going to 5GB/s.

Keep in mind that the graph is for a 70/30 mix, and PCIe is full duplex. Given that, 800k+ IOPS is pushing it for PCIe 3.0 x4, but not definitively impossible. The theoretical limit for one-way 4kB transfers on PCIe 3 x4 accounting for overhead is about 870k IOPS, and I know there are PCIe 3 x8 cards that achieve ~1.7M IOPS. PCIe 4.0 support is likely, but I'll need to see some higher performance numbers before I consider it confirmed that Alder Stream does PCIe 4.0.

(Also, the fine print on Intel's slides didn't mention a different host system for the Alder Stream results, so if they used something other than the same Skylake-SP that the P4800X and P4610 were tested with, that's a misleading omission. But it's also possible they used a PCIe 4.0 switch with the same host CPU.)

 

[IntelUser2000]

Keep in mind that the graph is for a 70/30 mix, and PCIe is full duplex.

The P4800X is rated at 2400MB/s Read, 2000MB/s Write with 550K/500K IOPS.

You can see from the latency rising that at about 470K IOPS it starts rising drastically. Even then it keeps going until it reaches the 500K limit.

So 500K IOPs in terms of transfer is on the low end. Alder Stream though, hasn't even reached that point even at 800K IOPS.

Also, Icelake-SP is PCIe Gen 4.

Another thing:

 

[Billy Tallis]

The P4800X is rated at 2400MB/s Read, 2000MB/s Write with 550K/500K IOPS.

You can see from the latency rising that at about 470K IOPS it starts rising drastically. Even then it keeps going until it reaches the 500K limit.

So 500K IOPs in terms of transfer is on the low end. Alder Stream though, hasn't even reached that point even at 800K IOPS.

None of these performance limits are consequences of a PCIe bottleneck. They're a result of limited bandwidth on the 7 channels between the SSD controller and the 3D XPoint memory. Throughput stops increasing and latency goes through the roof past QD8 because all 7 channels are busy all the time and some commands have to sit idle in the queue before being serviced. The slight increases in latency leading up to the inflection point are a result of having a random workload instead of one that evenly balances requests across all 7 channels; otherwise, we'd see a sharper corner.

It's entirely possible for Alder Stream to reach the performance levels shown thus far by increasing the channel count and beefing up the controller without touching the PCIe frontend.

 

[Dayman1225]

Intel posted the keynote and all the accompaning presentation/slides on their newsroom website here

 

[IntelUser2000]

It's entirely possible for Alder Stream to reach the performance levels shown thus far by increasing the channel count and beefing up the controller without touching the PCIe frontend.

Their Ethernet 800 series product is PCIe 4.0. Just because its not on their current platforms doesn't mean every other product needs to be gated by it.

Most of the PCIe 4.0 SSDs don't really need the interface either. They barely go over the limit.

Also the DC PMMs already exceed the PCIe 4.0 limits on reads with only 8-channels.

PCIe 4.0 is also good for marketing.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Optane PMMs(Persistent Memory Modules) are not only coming to workstations but evidently to HEDT Core i9 systems, and in the future regular client!

Performance of the Optane DC PMM modules:

8GB/s Read, 2.3GB/s write

The sequential speeds are nothing to write home about, but the real thing about these are the latency figures. It truly is 1000x faster than NAND.

The NAND SSDs can do 80-150us that vary with queue depth and applications. Optane SSDs are at 10-20us.

These DIMMs are in a whole another world altogether. The latency is 180-340ns, which means its an additional 30-40x faster than Optane SSDs.

Though, to take full advantage of it requires application support. You see, typical storage uses 4K blocks, and Optane PMMs have what's called "App Direct over Storage". And in that mode its essentially a true RAMDrive with 2-3us access times.

Optimizing the application is what's called App Direct mode and where it will have the 180-340ns latency.

The endurance of the 256GB DC PMM model is rated at max write speeds for 5 years. Put in numbers, that's 362PB, or 770DWPD. An Intel guy said the modules will last much longer than that though.

This product has the potential to truly revolutionize computing. Even things like optimizing the OS to reside in the PMMs for nearly instantaneous boot is something that average joes can appreciate.

Eventually starting with the HEDT desktops, applications will get support for App Direct. Maybe in 5 years, we'll see desktop applications that have no loading times when on a computer using the PMMs.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Optane H10 looks to have a successor. The next generation is called Wolf Glacier. Current generation is Teton Glacier.

 

[nosirrahx]

Google Optane PICe 4.0 to watch multiple tech outlets report that PCIe 4.0 devices wont work on PCIe 3.0 interfaces.

I would be astonished if these new Optane drives have high enough sequential speed that 3.0 cripples them.

Not only that but Optane is all about low latency and insanely fast mixed read/write of small random bits of data, high sequential speed on a consumer SSD is just a fluff stat in most cases.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Alder Stream next generation Optane SSD to have "3 times the throughput and 4 times lower application latency".

If that means 6GB/s read/write they will have quite a nice drive out there. Don't know how they are getting the latency that low though. Maybe they're talking about comparisons in specific usage scenarios.