It stands out, because it didn't sell. Which is weird because there were some pretty big pros about using them. The latency for updating 1 byte was crazy good. Some databases or journals for something like zfs really benefited from this.
I never understood what they're meant to do. Intel seemed to picture some future where RAM is persistent; but they were never close to fast enough to replace RAM, and the option to reboot in order to fix some weird state your system has gotten itself into is a feature of computers, not a problem to work around.
I feel sorry about the situation. From my perspective Optane was a godsend for databases. I was contemplating building a system. Could've been a pinnacle of vertical scalability for cheap.
Fabs are expensive and all, but maybe running a right-sized fab could have still been profitable at making optane for low-latency work that it was so good at. Even moreso with RAM prices as they are.
PE popped already, now Private credit is already popping, having been in too many bubbles, Datacenter bubble popped them. The whole system just isn't talking about it because the media isn't doing their job to report. There are no more good loans to make, the ROI is nil and the interest rate is spot plus 5.5%, and businesses don't want to pay 10% interest on a loan. We're ina zombie cycle
Optane was crazy good tech, it way just too expensive at the time for mass adoption, but the benefits were so good.
Looking at those charts, besides the DWPD it feels like normal NVMe has mostly caught up. I occassionally wonder where a gen 7/8(?) optane would be today if it caught on, it'd probably be nuts.
My understanding is Optane is still unbeaten when it comes to latency. Has anyone examined its use as an OS volume, compared to today's leading SSD's? I know the throughput won't be as high, but in my experience that's not as important to how responsive your machine feels as latency.
I run two 1.5TB Optanes in raid-0 with XFS (I picked them up for $300 each on sale about two years ago). These are limited to PCIE 3.0 x4 (about 4GB/s max each). I also have a 64GB optane drive I use as my boot drive.
It's hard to tell you, because it's subjective, I don't swap back and forth between an SSD and the optane drives. I have my old system, which has a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro NVME drive (PCIE 4.0 x4, or 8GB/s max) as root, and a Sabrent rocket 4 plus 4TB drive secondary (also PCIE 4.0), so I ran sysbench on both systems, so I could share the differences. (Old system 5950X, new system 9950X3D).
It feels snappier, especially when doing compilations...
Sequential reads:
I started with a 150GB fileset, but it was being served by the kernel cache on my newer system (256GB RAM vs 128GB on the old), so I switched to use 300GB of data, and the optanes gave me 5000 MiB/s for sequential read as opposed to 2800 MiB/s for the 980 Pro, and 4340 MiB/s for the Rocket 4 Plus.
Random writes alone (no read workload)
The optane system gets 2184 MiB/s, the 980 Pro gets 32 MiB/s, and the Rocket 4 Plus gets 53 MiB/s.
Mixed workload (random read/write)
The optanes get 725/483 as opposed to 9/6 for the 980 Pro, and 42/28 for the Rocket 4 Plus.
2x1.5TB Optane Raid0:
Prep time:
`sysbench fileio --file-total-size=150G prepare`
161061273600 bytes written in 50.41 seconds (3047.27 MiB/sec).
Benchmark:
`sysbench fileio --file-total-size=150G --file-test-mode=rndrw --max-time=60 --max-requests=0 run`
WARNING: --max-time is deprecated, use --time instead
sysbench 1.0.20 (using system LuaJIT 2.1.1741730670)
Running the test with following options:
Number of threads: 1
Initializing random number generator from current time
Extra file open flags: (none)
128 files, 1.1719GiB each
150GiB total file size
Block size 16KiB
Number of IO requests: 0
Read/Write ratio for combined random IO test: 1.50
Periodic FSYNC enabled, calling fsync() each 100 requests.
Calling fsync() at the end of test, Enabled.
Using synchronous I/O mode
Doing random r/w test
Initializing worker threads...
Threads started!
File operations:
reads/s: 46421.95
writes/s: 30947.96
fsyncs/s: 99034.84
Throughput:
read, MiB/s: 725.34
written, MiB/s: 483.56
General statistics:
total time: 60.0005s
total number of events: 10584397
Latency (ms):
min: 0.00
avg: 0.01
max: 1.32
95th percentile: 0.03
sum: 58687.09
Threads fairness:
events (avg/stddev): 10584397.0000/0.00
execution time (avg/stddev): 58.6871/0.00
2TB Nand Samsung 980 Pro:
Prep time:
`sysbench fileio --file-total-size=150G prepare`
161061273600 bytes written in 87.15 seconds (1762.53 MiB/sec).
Benchmark:
`sysbench fileio --file-total-size=150G --file-test-mode=rndrw --max-time=60 --max-requests=0 run`
WARNING: --max-time is deprecated, use --time instead
sysbench 1.0.20 (using system LuaJIT 2.1.1741730670)
Running the test with following options:
Number of threads: 1
Initializing random number generator from current time
Extra file open flags: (none)
128 files, 1.1719GiB each
150GiB total file size
Block size 16KiB
Number of IO requests: 0
Read/Write ratio for combined random IO test: 1.50
Periodic FSYNC enabled, calling fsync() each 100 requests.
Calling fsync() at the end of test, Enabled.
Using synchrono...
Sure, they were expensive but they have great endurance and sustained read and write speeds. I use one in my car for camera recordings. I had gone through several other drives but this one has been going on 3 or 4 years now without issue. I have a couple more in use too. It's a shame this tech is going away because it's excellent.
Around the time of Optane's discontinuation, the rumor mill was saying that the real reason it got the axe was that it couldn't be shrunk any, so its costs would never go down. Does anyone know if that's true? I never heard anything solid, but it made a lot of sense given what we know about Optane's fab process.
And if no shrink was possible, is that because it was (a) possible but too hard; (b) known blocks to a die shrink; or (c) execs didn't want to pay to find out?
One potential application I briefly had hope for was really good power loss protection in front of a conventional Flash SSD. You only need a little compared to the overall SSD capacity to be able to correctly report the write was persisted, and it's always running, so there's less of a 'will PLP work when we really need it?' question. (Maybe there's some use as a read cache too? Host RAM's probably better for that, though.) It's going to be rewritten lots of times, but it's supposed to be ready for that.
It seems like there's a very small window, commercially, for new persistent memories. Flash throughput scales really cost-efficiently, and a lot is already built around dealing with the tens-of-microseconds latencies (or worse--networked block storage!). Read latencies you can cache your way out of, and writers can either accept commit latency or play it a little fast and loose (count a replicated write as safe enough or...just not be safe). You have to improve on Flash by enough to make it worth the leap while remaining cheaper than other approaches to the same problem, and you have to be confident enough in pulling it off to invest a ton up front. Not easy!
I think a factor in Optane's demise was dishonesty on the part of low-end laptop manufacturers.
You were a poor student looking for an entry-level cheap laptop and saw a lot of models with 4GB [RAM] "memory" and suddenly there was this one model with "20 GB memory" for the same price. Seemed attractive to the regular guy, but this in fact was 4GB RAM + 16 GB Optane non-volatile storage (and maybe a paltry 32 GB SSD for the rest). Optane would be treated as a drive for storing the Windows OS.
That conflation of Optane storage as "memory", hinting that this was equal to RAM, turned many people against it once they fell victims to that bait-and-switch.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 50.2 ms ] threadIn an era of RAM shortages and quarterly price increases, Optane remains viable for swap and CPU/GPU cache.
https://pcper.com/2017/06/how-3d-xpoint-phase-change-memory-...
Looking at those charts, besides the DWPD it feels like normal NVMe has mostly caught up. I occassionally wonder where a gen 7/8(?) optane would be today if it caught on, it'd probably be nuts.
They suck for large sequential file access, but incredible for small random access: databases.
It's hard to tell you, because it's subjective, I don't swap back and forth between an SSD and the optane drives. I have my old system, which has a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro NVME drive (PCIE 4.0 x4, or 8GB/s max) as root, and a Sabrent rocket 4 plus 4TB drive secondary (also PCIE 4.0), so I ran sysbench on both systems, so I could share the differences. (Old system 5950X, new system 9950X3D).
It feels snappier, especially when doing compilations...
Sequential reads: I started with a 150GB fileset, but it was being served by the kernel cache on my newer system (256GB RAM vs 128GB on the old), so I switched to use 300GB of data, and the optanes gave me 5000 MiB/s for sequential read as opposed to 2800 MiB/s for the 980 Pro, and 4340 MiB/s for the Rocket 4 Plus.
Random writes alone (no read workload) The optane system gets 2184 MiB/s, the 980 Pro gets 32 MiB/s, and the Rocket 4 Plus gets 53 MiB/s.
Mixed workload (random read/write) The optanes get 725/483 as opposed to 9/6 for the 980 Pro, and 42/28 for the Rocket 4 Plus.
2x1.5TB Optane Raid0: Prep time: `sysbench fileio --file-total-size=150G prepare` 161061273600 bytes written in 50.41 seconds (3047.27 MiB/sec).
2TB Nand Samsung 980 Pro: Prep time: `sysbench fileio --file-total-size=150G prepare` 161061273600 bytes written in 87.15 seconds (1762.53 MiB/sec).And if no shrink was possible, is that because it was (a) possible but too hard; (b) known blocks to a die shrink; or (c) execs didn't want to pay to find out?
https://goughlui.com/2024/07/28/tech-flashback-intel-optane-...
It seems like there's a very small window, commercially, for new persistent memories. Flash throughput scales really cost-efficiently, and a lot is already built around dealing with the tens-of-microseconds latencies (or worse--networked block storage!). Read latencies you can cache your way out of, and writers can either accept commit latency or play it a little fast and loose (count a replicated write as safe enough or...just not be safe). You have to improve on Flash by enough to make it worth the leap while remaining cheaper than other approaches to the same problem, and you have to be confident enough in pulling it off to invest a ton up front. Not easy!
(For posterity: Mouser and Digikey et alia carry these things and let you search/filter by cell type. They're not cheap.)
You were a poor student looking for an entry-level cheap laptop and saw a lot of models with 4GB [RAM] "memory" and suddenly there was this one model with "20 GB memory" for the same price. Seemed attractive to the regular guy, but this in fact was 4GB RAM + 16 GB Optane non-volatile storage (and maybe a paltry 32 GB SSD for the rest). Optane would be treated as a drive for storing the Windows OS.
That conflation of Optane storage as "memory", hinting that this was equal to RAM, turned many people against it once they fell victims to that bait-and-switch.