And yes I am saying H10 will have 905P-like sequentials.
Sequential of course is the big # that sells a drive but it would be great if H10 drives could have 200+MB/S 4KQ1T1 read speed. NAND currently cannot compete with that metric.
And yes I am saying H10 will have 905P-like sequentials.
It'd be nice if you can get everything, but that's just not the reality. It has to be competitive in pricing with other SSDs too.
Sequentials are important in not just marketing, because some people definitely care about that. You probably only need about 100MB/s Q1T1 and anything above that is pretty much as worth the same as super high sequentials. Maybe even 50MB/s is enough and the real advantage from an Optane drive is not so much latency as the stability in performance due to its write-in-place nature of the media.
Sequentials are important in file transfers and while not everyone cares about it, its also a real world metric. A product that's as expensive as Optane drives need a clean sweep win against something like the 970 Pro, and it doesn't because of sequentials.
H10 will be more important because it has the potential to drive volume, and without volume Optane series will simply die.
Optane part there is no reason the H10 couldn't have have blazing performance at the 4KQ1T1 level on top of great sequential speed.
Yea, but you are not the typical user. Actually, quite far from it.
While in laptops SSDs have greater marketshare, in desktops HDDs are still dominant, because demand for storage is still increasing very rapidly.
About the Optane size: DRAM buffers for HDDs and SSDs are tiny, yet they play a tremendous role in performance.
The 8TB Micron SSD really is the only huge capacity solid state option, I imagine that will change as QLC starts to become more popular.
16GB and 32GB were not super impressive when under heavier usage.
If the technology is doing a good job keeping frequently used small files mirrored in the Optane part there is no reason the H10 couldn't have have blazing performance at the 4KQ1T1 level on top of great sequential speed.
I am now responsible for 5 systems that use an Optane + SATA SSD configuration and the performance is simply amazing. The 58GB 800P + 2TB SATA SSD combo is currently my go to solution for speed, price and capacity. The 2TB 970 EVO is like $500. The 58GB 800P + 2TB 860 QVO is less than $400. Upgrade to the 118GB 800P and you are still cheaper than the 970 EVO.
I am a little worried about the small Optane cache size on these H10 drives. I have done a lot of experimenting and if you want a bunch of left over Optane cache you really need to use a 118GB 800P. The 58GB modules do pretty good on a more typical setup but if you use a lot of software/games the 58GB buffer is nearly full at all times. I can't recommend the 16GB/32GB modules.
The lower capacity modules also have much reduced sequential speeds. That will play a role.
NAND SSDs do with a DRAM buffer of maybe 1GB for the large ones. The H10 PCB has the DRAM buffer for the NAND controller plus Optane.
That is basically what primocache do.Of course but I as commenting more on how frequently HDD + 16GB and even HDD + 32GB setups felt like just a hard drive when I was doing several things at once. I guess falling back to NAND speed wont be as painful.
I have mixed feelings about going this route. I guess I was hoping a simplified design that wouldn't need DRAM at all so that costs could be reduced.
The enthusiast in me has been thinking about a cool 'roll your own' product that Intel could create loosely based on the H10.
Imagine a PCIe AIC that has a DDR4 port, SATA port and M.2 port supporting up to 22110. The intention being for the user to control how much NAND (or HDD), how much Optane cache and how much DRAM cache is on board.
This would allow Intel to unload much of the cost onto the user as they pick out the 3 parts that are right for their specific use case.
Making 3D XPoint viable requires volume. 25x might be what's required.
One of the fascinating, and I think underplayed, parts of this new card line is an artificial intelligence (AI) component which can be trained to up-convert images. They first render in low resolution and then the AI takes over and converts the image in real time to 4K or 8K. This conversion capability can be applied to most any low-resolution image. The AI learns how to interpolate the needed extra pixels and then reimages the picture or frame to create a far higher resolution result. Interestingly, it can do the same thing with frames in a movie to take a regular speed GoPro-like video file and convert it into the kind of high-speed video file that would typically require a $140K high-speed camera.
This powerful ability to, relatively inexpensively, create and modify images in photo-realistic ways will, I believe, fundamentally change the TV and movie industry. We should see increased interest in old shows and movies as they are updated to new digital standards and movies created from scratch which are both less expensive to create and more realistic to watch. Of course, it won’t fix issues with the scripts and editing (two areas that could also use some AI help), but the quality and amount of video content should increase substantially as a result of this.
The bottom line is that for applications that require a larger memory footprint than can be supplied by DRAM, Optane DC has clear potential, with cost becoming a deciding factor. The situation is more complicated when using Optane DC as an in-memory storage device replacement, since results appear to be more sensitive to application type and the degree of software optimization that the customer is willing to pursue.
Aurora also comes armed with "a future generation" of Intel's Optane DC Persistent Memory using 3D XPoint that can be addressed as either storage or memory. This marks the first known implementation of Intel's new memory in a supercomputer-class system, but it isn't clear if the reference to a future generation implies an upcoming version of the Optane variant beyond Intel's first-gen DIMMs.
Neither Intel nor the DOE would comment on what GPU form factor will make an appearance in the new supercomputer, but logically we could expect these to be Intel's discrete graphics cards.
On either side of the CPU clusters are a total of four GPU clusters, each consisting of two GPU chiplets on a respective active interposer. Upon each GPU chiplet is a 3D stack of DRAM (e.g., some futuregeneration of JEDEC high-bandwidth memory (HBM) [12]).The DRAM is directly stacked on the GPU chiplets to maximize bandwidth (the GPUs are expected to provide the peak computational throughput) while minimizing memory-related data movement energy and total package footprint. CPU computations tend to be more latency sensitive, and so the central placement of the CPU cores reduces NUMA-like effects by keeping the CPU-to-DRAM distance relatively uniform.
Maybe instead of Xe dGPU connected over PCIe x16 the Xe GPU will connect to the Xeon CPU over EMIB so the Xe GPU will have full speed access to the Optane DIMMs.
Update on Optane Memory M15: Up to 64GB capacity, specs same at Up to 2.1GB/s Read, 1GB/s Write
(reason: the current Optane dies are only good for ~150 MB/s Sequential write each).
IntelUser2000, M15 is available in up to 128GB
Optane SSDs can do at least 300MB/s. It's only the Optane Memory line that's limited.
You mean 300 MB/s per channel right?
Optane M10 (and 800p) is also 300 MB/s per channel.
The 16 and 32GB versions are rated identically to the Optane Memory.
There's no TDP difference between the 16GB and the 32GB in the original version, while there's quite a bit of difference on the M10, leading me to believe the lower bandwidth might have been due to power as well, and 145MB/s per channel being a power-related limit.
If you look at this review: https://techreport.com/review/33338...8-gb-and-118-gb-solid-state-drives-reviewed/3
There's an indication that its throttling at some points. If there's zero active power management, TDP levels have to be set conservatively, since it'll run at that speed all that time. If active power management exists, it can be made to run faster in all but the worst case scenarios.
Further data based on the M.2 P4801X: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?productIds=149364,149365,149367,149366
Capped write speeds are likely related to TDP limits.
PCMs offer unique opportunities for low-power data storage, and appear to be among the few nonvolatile memory candidates whose properties (e.g. energy consumption) signifi-
cantly improve with downscaling of the memory cells.
The switching time and energy consumption of the PCM cell are dependent on cell dimensions. Scaling PCM cells to nanometer dimensions decreases the thermal time constant as well as the heat capacity of the cell. Therefore, PCM devices improve with scaling in terms of energy consumption and switching speed. Nonetheless, the temperature rise, electro-thermal properties, and thermoelectric effects of nanometer-scale PCM cells have only been recently investigated.
Thinking about how poorly write scales at lower power I can't imagine it doing that much better at higher power.
But getting back to performance per die it really does look to be not much greater than 150 MB/s....at least at the TDPs Intel is willing to supply.
Yes it can do much better than 150MB/s at higher power, we already have it in the form of 900P/905P.
900p 280GB has 21 Optane dies and write speed of 2000 MB/s.
Still 7-channels, thus 300MB/s. Channels matter, not dies.