[HN Gopher] Understanding the Intel Optane Shutdown
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Understanding the Intel Optane Shutdown
Author : lichtenberger
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-09-20 11:15 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techtarget.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techtarget.com)
| fiat_fandango wrote:
| Low latency optane ssd's are incredible for so many reasons -
| really hope those don't become discontinued as well :(
|
| Many here seem to miss how deeply complex SSD's are and how truly
| different optane is from most consumer and enterprise SSD
| offerings. Most consumer ssd's only optimize for sequential reads
| and writes and at that max throughput, not latency for random
| access. Glossing over a lot of detail, but this is where optane
| truly shines.
| neverartful wrote:
| Surprised that there was not even a single mention of Micron! My
| understanding is that it was a joint venture of some variety
| between Intel and Micron.
|
| I'm sad to see Optane being discontinued. I had very good
| performance results with it being incorporated into SDS cluster
| architectures.
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| IIRC Intel bought Micron out of the 3DXpoint/Optane project in
| 2018, and (based a some hallway conversations at conferences)
| folks at Micron were not exactly enthusiastic about the early
| results from the technology or Intel's overhyping marketing
| years before then.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Interesting - do you mean Optane PMem (i.e. where it is
| connected as a DIMM)? Or the Optane SSDs?
| tpetry wrote:
| Optane SSDs had been great! They have the fastest write
| latency which made them e.g. perfect for databases or the ZFS
| ZIL which is a write of any new block to a special space (on
| that optane ssd) that will later be rewritten to the slower
| ssd.
| fluoridation wrote:
| It had good performance, but part of the problem is that Intel
| way oversold it at the beginning. They said they would be
| "1000x faster, 1000x more enduring, and 10x more dense than
| NAND". In the end none of these promises materialized. They
| released these puny little drives that had a bit better latency
| than NVMe SSDs, that were locked to Intel systems, that OSs
| didn't know what to do with them, and that didn't quite fit
| anywhere in the memory hierarchy.
|
| Yeah, it found a few niche uses, but it was never going to be
| sustainable.
| nolanhergert89 wrote:
| Don't confuse the Optane SSD products (worse binned media
| over a slower NVMe link) with the higher-performance (and
| more expensive) Optane Persistent Memory product. For the
| latter, the latency looks to be sub-microsecond (~100X?
| SSDs), bandwidth is ~3-5X SSDs, ~10X more endurance, and up
| to 10X more dense than DRAM (512GB sticks anyone?). Don't
| have a specific good source though, just from Googling.
|
| I wasn't a marketing person, but I was on the engineering
| side.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Like I said in the other comment, all I cared about was
| having many gigs of memory on desktop. I never got a whiff
| of those 512 GB sticks, although I sure would have loved to
| get my hands on them. If Intel segmented them for the
| datacenter then whoop-de-fucking-doo. All I ever saw were
| shitty little useless cache drives.
| Melatonic wrote:
| That really sounds like they need better marketing people
| lol
|
| Why would they name those two things the SAME? Call one
| Optane and one of them Budge-Tane or something
| paulmd wrote:
| Not OP but marketing was obviously a huge problem for
| Optane. Intel Marketing did an absolutely terrible job.
|
| * You've got Optane Memory, the PDIMM, which only works
| with a limited set of Intel products
|
| * You've got Optane the NVMe drive, which works with
| anything, and are available in sizes usable as a boot
| disk or for databases/ZIL/etc
|
| * You've got Optane Memory, the 16gb/32gb cache drive
| used in shitty laptops to try and boost performance, but
| actually those are just really small NVMe SSDs and can be
| used as such if you want.
|
| * You've got Optane the caching software, which only
| works with Intel motherboards/laptops, and basically does
| the same thing as PrimoCache/StoreMI.
|
| etc. And Intel marketing just made zero effort to
| distinguish or clarify these products in any way... to
| this day you get people thinking you had to own an intel
| system to use optane drives.
| [deleted]
| wtallis wrote:
| > "1000x faster, 1000x more enduring, and 10x more dense than
| NAND"
|
| Their claims were actually a mix of comparisons against NAND
| and DRAM; I don't think they ever claimed it would be denser
| than NAND, just denser than DRAM.
|
| Also, the Optane SSDs were never locked to Intel systems,
| just their caching software for Windows and the Optane DIMMs.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Their claims were actually a mix of comparisons against
| NAND and DRAM; I don't think they ever claimed it would be
| denser than NAND, just denser than DRAM.
|
| You're right. I looked up the slide before commenting to
| look at the numbers and misread it. Actually, that reminds
| me that the first time I saw the slide years ago I hoped we
| were going to have Optane memory sticks and desktops with
| hundreds of gigabytes of main memory, even if with worse
| latency. I remember being so disappointed when Optane
| finally came out and reading the actual numbers. Yeah, the
| latency was okayish, but the throughput was barely better
| than NAND.
|
| >Also, the Optane SSDs were never locked to Intel systems,
| just their caching software for Windows and the Optane
| DIMMs.
|
| If anything, that just makes it worse. I was quite
| interested in Optane, and _I_ can 't remember which things
| were what and what they worked on. The product line was so
| confusing.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| I wonder if standardisation efforts around things like UCIe
| and CXL will solve the locked to Intel problem, potentially
| enabling a sustainable market for such devices in future?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| It was never just about Optane. The joint Micron/Intel 3DXPoint
| technology was meant to be a new type of non-volatile memory
| who's performance was closer to memory than disk, leading to all
| sorts of revolutionary changes in the way memory was used.
|
| The trouble is the performance goals were never realized, so the
| revolutionary non-volatile main memory use case was not realized.
| Optane/SSD-usage seems to have been an attempt to at least
| salvage something from the investment given that it was fast
| enough for that, but I suppose it the end it can't have been cost
| competitive with NAND-based SSDs. Perhaps the economy of scale
| would have been different if the technology had met it's
| performance goals and been more widely used ?
| Veliladon wrote:
| Optane was an interesting solution that was still looking for a
| question. One of the things that drove mass SSD adoption was the
| experience was plainly better. Even the most illiterate user
| could see how fucking fast an SSD machine booted and how much
| more responsive they were.
|
| SSD to Optane? There's no practical difference. The high end
| desktop users and serious gamers that have serious cash for their
| rigs turned up their noses at Optane because it turns out SSD
| sequential read was good enough for most use cases. At least good
| enough to not pay 3x more per GB. Nobody really cared about
| insane sustained write speed when the SLC caches did almost as
| well in most use cases. Plus as the interfaces scaled up, plain
| old NAND drives were ready to flood the bus with as much
| sequential read bandwidth that the bus would take.
|
| What could have saved it? I dunno. If Intel wanted to be anti-
| competitive they could have slapped on 8 PCIe lanes direct to the
| CPU exclusively for Optane on their desktop products. As we've
| found out, 4 lanes of NVMe to the CPU and the rest having to go
| through the chipset is some sort of unfunny, market segmentation
| joke. It could have forced high end users to grudgingly accept
| Optane as the path to the absolute best I/O and an actual,
| tangible difference in performance.
| luma wrote:
| I think one of the major missing factors is lack of OS support
| for the sorts of features that NVDIMM could potentially bring
| to the table. Super-fast wake from deep hibernation is just a
| starting point, the real work is re-writing every line of code
| written since the dawn of computing which starts from the two
| assumptions "one kind of storage is persistent and slow" and
| "the other kind of storage is volatile and fast".
|
| HPE made noise about challenging those assumptions with The
| Machine but predictably lost interest as their own memristor
| technology lost steam.
| orlp wrote:
| > What could have saved it?
|
| Persistent memory was/is a big topic in the database research
| world. The idea was that you would not need to worry about ACID
| since all your data is still there in the event of a power
| loss/crash. It would massively simplify database code.
|
| However as it turns out... persistent memory doesn't buy you
| all that much. You still effectively need a replay log to
| restore the state you were in before a crash event, and you
| still need all the restoration code. In the end it in most
| systems it just behaved as a very fast (and expensive) SSD. The
| benefits vs. price just wasn't there as a modern DB setup on a
| fast SSD + more RAM would get you much more performance per
| dollar.
|
| What you'd really need is _transactional_ memory, not just
| persistent memory. And you 'd need a database engine written
| completely from the ground up to use this memory. Probably
| several hundred KLoC of tricky code (and all the joys that come
| with parallel programming), targeted at hardware that doesn't
| even exist yet. Sounds very expensive and risky to me.
|
| I think eventually we'll see something in this line of
| technology become commercially available. But I'm not surprised
| that Intel pulled out.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Optane was pretty great for fs and db logs / journals.
|
| That was pretty much its killer (practical) use case.
| gavinray wrote:
| > " And you'd need a database engine written completely from
| the ground up to use this memory."
|
| You mean like the one from one of CMU's research projects,
| that Pavlo et al have written about?
|
| https://db.cs.cmu.edu/projects/nvm/ "How to
| Build a Non-Volatile Memory Database Management System," in
| Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on
| Management of Data, 2017 "Spitfire: A Three-Tier
| Buffer Manager for Volatile and Non-Volatile Memory," in
| Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on
| Management of Data, 2021, pp. 2195-2207.
| Melatonic wrote:
| It could have made a big difference but it was adoption that
| was the problem. Swapping an SSD from a HDD is very easy and
| straight forward for most people - SATA cables are also well
| designed and easy to understand. Its almost like a USB cable in
| an L shape.
|
| Completely changing the format? That is a huge obstacle.
|
| NVME SSD's also came along soon enough we got something that
| was much, much faster than SATA SSD's and eventually I think it
| just became clear it was diminishing returns. That being said I
| am still hoping for an Optane replacement.
| mort96 wrote:
| What's more, Optane was sold as... a cache to have in front of
| your spinning rust. In an age where SSDs were cheap enough that
| you could just get a few TB of SSD and have all your data
| access sped up, not just what happens to be in cache.
| paulmd wrote:
| > One of the things that drove mass SSD adoption was the
| experience was plainly better. Even the most illiterate user
| could see how fucking fast an SSD machine booted and how much
| more responsive they were.
|
| > SSD to Optane? There's no practical difference.
|
| No, that's false. That's true of NVMe in general but Optane
| specifically is really good at the low-queue-depth random-4k
| workloads that characterize consumer use-cases.
|
| Optane actually is extremely fast at things like OS patches
| that normally take a few minutes even on NVMe flash let alone
| sata. They boot faster, applications launch faster, etc.
| Normally those things don't have lots of parallel threads
| running so queue depth is low and flash doesn't perform very
| well (as in, SATA and NVMe are nearly indistinguishable), but
| Optane really helps.
|
| Is that worth paying 10x as much for? No, probably not, but
| that's the real problem, not the general lack of performance.
| Optane is actually noticeable _specifically for_ being the
| first thing that actually provides a noticeable improvement
| above and beyond SATA SSDs for consumer use-cases. It 's just
| also too expensive to be justifiable.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Although "client computing" is still the largest source of
| Intel revenue, and its scale was what made the x86
| architecture able to crush legacy server architectures, I
| think Intel takes it for granted relative to the data center.
|
| It would have been very interesting to see an "all Optane"
| tablet device but it would have been hard to make work: a
| modest amount of storage would be affordable but it would
| take a clean sheet OS to maximize performance and economics.
|
| I was skeptical about Optane DIMMs.
|
| Optane SSDs were the fastest SSD you'd ever seen, but the
| DIMMS were the slowest you'd seen in a while. Although they
| were faster than Optane SSDs, they were slower than RAM if
| you replaced RAM 1-1. Optane was denser and cheaper than
| ordinary RAM so you could pack your machine with a huge
| quantity of slow RAM.
|
| If access patterns and cache behavior permit, you could build
| systems of a certain problem size that perform well with
| Optane. Advanced programming techniques can help.
|
| For every big problem there are many little problems (don't
| need Optane) and some problems are too big for Optane. Many
| problems in the size range for Optane can be implemented to
| conserve RAM and have access patterns that stream well to
| mass storage. Thus Optane faced fierce competition.
| monocasa wrote:
| > and its scale was what made the x86 architecture able to
| crush legacy server architectures, I think Intel takes it
| for granted relative to the data center
|
| This is true; the reason is that the margins on the data
| center chips are what keeps the lights on.
| [deleted]
| christkv wrote:
| They should have sold it as level 4 cache
| skyde wrote:
| you mean swap drive ?
| gavinray wrote:
| At least the PMDK (Persistent Memory Development Kit) code works
| interoperably with both Optane and CXL:
|
| https://github.com/pmem/pmdk
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