we just kicked off Spring cleaning at our studio which wouldn't normally be a
video except we came across this a
$15,000 server with two CPUs eight ssds
and a whopping 6.3 terabytes of RAM when we got this
from Intel 3 years ago we did a quick unboxing promising a deeper dive into
some of its more exotic features and then promptly forgot about it well that
RAM I showed you guys is is n RAM at all but optain persistent memory modules you
might know that Intel's optain business was sadly shuttered in June of 2022
which means the contacts who originally sent us this have sadly moved on we on
the other hand haven't so all these
years later I am finally going to do what I said I was going to do and finish
building the rer piece I mean sorry I mean digging into what made optain so
special and cool and what ultimately killed it just like I'm
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before we go any further some of you probably need a refresher isn't Intel
optain and SSD what's it doing in a RAM slot well optane was more of a family
than an individual product ranging from inexpensive hard drive accelerators for
pre-builts where the manufacturer was too cheap to install a real SSD to
incredibly low latency not to mention expensive storage for the fastest
servers in existence what all of these uses had in common though was they
looked like conventional memory and storage devices but functioned somewhere
in between and that's exactly what we're
looking at here this appears to be a normal SSD but the 3D Cross Point chips
inside it have just 100th the latency of
regular Nan flash as for this guy well it looks like a stick of ddr4 memory but
it's actually an Intel optain persistent memory series 100 module with a whopping
512 gigs of storage on it and this
server has 12 of them for a total of 6
tabes that's enough to fit nearly 12 High bit rate Floatplane exclusives
solely in system memory wait a second lus memory I thought you just said it
was storage I did but the simplest way
to take advantage of it is in memory mode where your optain modules just show
up to your operating system as a whole whack load of RAM now the bad thing
about this mode is that it forces optane to have one of the big downsides of RAM
for security reasons every time an
optain module in memory mode gets restarted it generates a new
cryptographic key effectively wiping all of the data that it contained the good
news is that optane can handle many more
wipes than regular ssds so this is
unlikely to harm it and what's also cool is that no special coding is needed to
immediately use memory mode and the CPU's memory controller will even
automatically move colder data off of
the memory onto the optain and vice versa let me show you how this would
work in a demanding professional application right now you're looking at
solid works flow simulator but we aren't simulating anything at the moment
because first we need to generate a mesh which is essentially a 3D Space full of
data sampling points where some fluid
let's say air is going to interact with some object say this heat sink it's not
using that much RAM though what 45 gigs 48 gigs that's a lot of RAM okay it's a
lot of RAM but it's 2% of what we have the issue is that it just takes hours
for the CPU to process a large enough mesh like this for it to fill up all of
that RAM let alone the optain that's in there and this is a really silly way of
doing this so what you're saying is flow
doesn't need that much RAM obtaine is pointless no no no Flo Sim does need
heaps and heaps of RAM just a model like
this doesn't necessarily if we were trying to run something that's super
complex like crashing a car into a barrier having terabytes of memory could
be the difference between a finishing in a day and a finishing in a week of
course though this isn't memory its latency is several times higher which
would obviously impact performance the question is though how much to find out
we came up with a rather terrible idea
why don't we just remove a bunch of the actual RAM so that the system has no
choice but to use the obtaine and then we can do a before and
after it's not going to do anything is it
nope oh jeez there goes the alarm wait
maybe there's no way no sadly Intel
thought of that and requires each stick of obtain pm to be paired with a stick
of RAM in order for the system to function at all and they have a
recommended ratio of 4 to1 optained to
RAM for Optimal Performance ours however
it's more like a 16 to1 ratio and the server came straight from Intel
so what do we do with the rest of it as
it turns out many customers simply used
higher ratios but there are some other ways to take advantage of the persistent
part of our persistent memory app direct
mode and storage mode which Alex is
showing us now yes app direct mode exposes the optain directly to the
application which can use it like storage RAM or somewhere in between
unfortunately we aren't able to show this off because doing so would require
us to code our own program that explicitly takes advantage of it and
this is a task that almost no company's worth billions of dollars found to be
worthwhile so doing it for a YouTube video would have a dubious Roi to say
the least what we can show you is storage mode have you ever wondered what
would happen if you could plug your SSD into a high-speed memory slot well
basically this storage mode presents the obtained tier operating system much like
an SSD just with super low latency compared to traditional Mand flash
setting this bit up though was what caused this project to be stalled for
months because we just couldn't figure out how to do it not because Alex is
dumb or because I'm dumb but rather because the BIOS on this Intel
motherboard is so poorly organized now okay okay sorry this is going to be a
bit of a tangent but motherboard manufactures can you please figure your
shiz out I mean we have this industrywide problem where every single
motherboard maker calls the exact same setting something ever so slightly
different and then puts it in a different place meaning even if you are
quite knowledgeable and not dumb and you know exactly what you're looking for
there's a solid chance you won't be able to find it we were easily able to figure
out how to use app direct mode on Dell
super micro Lenovo and HP server boards since they had decent documentation but
no not the Intel one we even called up Patrick from serve the home who
literally wrote the guide on how to do this and he couldn't figure it out
either okay look at this Lis I'm going to go back to the main
menu we're looking for the memory controller spot where do you think that
is well I would go to Advanced and then
I would probably go to memory configuration so this is why we needed
Emily to help us find it yes it is under PCI configuration um option ROM
controller and that's where the memory controller is of course I can't believe
we didn't think of that Anyway by using
storage mode we're able to select how much of the optain we want to be
presented as an SSD and we can create volumes with it much like with a raid
array with the maximum performance occurring when you interleave across
multiple optained dims that are operating on the same CPU which
essentially creates a raid zero array on opan now as you might have guessed this
does come with the risk of data loss so if you don't care as much about
performance you might want to mirror the data across both CPUs or I don't know
maybe just buy an SSD but all of that aside the coolest
configuration is mixed mode this allows you to set a target for how much of your
optain will be storage and how much will be RAM creating a Best of Both Worlds
situation where the BIOS handles all of the complex bits and you get both cheap
RAM and super low latency storage all
right what's your memory percentage goal what do you mean goal it's doesn't
really do exact it just kind of gets close to the percentage that you want I
think we all know the answer to that nice so we
reboot need sorry seemed
mad okay all right no you don't seem mad
you seem rightfully like we need to discuss
this come on come on create name space here we go there we go how about now
there we go I love how surprised it is it's making a
YouTube thumbnail face speaking of which we're working on a really cool video now
that YouTube has AB testing for thumbnails Maria is creating a like
cringe YouTuber face version of every thumbnail for a little bit and then just
like a nice relaxed one and then we're going to make a video about which ones
people actually prefer whatever they say they prefer it could change our
thumbnail practices there we go all right okay what we're looking at right
now is our G Drive which is a conventional nbme SSD and our o Drive
which is our optain drive and this measure is seconds per transfer which is
essentially the latency of each operation on the drive now what we're
going to do is we're going to run Crystal disc mark on both of these
drives at the same time and
theoretically yes yep the regular NVMe
is way more which is bad o is opan opan
which makes sense because it barely even appears that's how low the latency of
this is which doesn't matter for everything and in fact if we have a look
at our Crystal dis Mark results it's not that fast in terms of
sequential transfer speeds it's just that it's really really responsive wow
we've done it we go okay we can actually see what the crap we're looking at now
here we go this is what we expect to see
all three tests are running right now
there we go yes and our SATA is much
higher in terms of latency not to mention that it can be very inconsistent
see that initial Spike when we first hit it that's a yikes and while NVMe is a
lot better it doesn't have that super
super flat line when all of them are running the same test that we see with
optane where the latency is negligible which which can be a huge benefit for
certain applications and not terribly
important for others which is cool in
some cases really cool so then why does
optain no longer exist the answer is many many reasons
the first and biggest problem is that optin arrived 2 years late it was
supposed to come with Skylake in 2017
with speeds that matched the ddr4 2666
that would be paired with those processors but obtaine didn't arrive
until Cascade Lake which used 2933 megat
transfer per second dims that meant that by choosing optain you would be giving
up memory bandwidth to every application
that doesn't need the extra capacity that is not ideal also in 2017 there was
a global drram shortage as phones like the Samsung Galaxy S6 Google pixel and
HTC1 M9 started using ddr4 while Samsung
and Micron were struggling to ramp up production 16 gigs of RAM hit prices of
over $200 that would have been a perfect
opportunity for an almost RAM product at a lower price except that by 2019 that
same 16 gigs of RAM was down to more like a hundo also remember how we
mentioned that each stick of obtained PM requires a stick of RAM to pair with it
in order for it to work well yeah so companies that were looking
into optain they weren't just comparing the price of opan versus RAM they had to
look at the cost of an optain module and
a stick of RAM compared to just getting two sticks of RAM that uh oh by the way
are going to run faster Tom's Hardware has an article from 2019 about the
pricing quoting a single stick of this
512 gig optain at a cool
$675 meaning that this server that we
casually lost when it was new had
$81,000 worth of optane in it that
sounds like a lot because it is but in
2019 a single stick of 128 gigs of ECC
memory was roughly $4500 meaning optain was only about
onethird of the price so wait hold on a second that was in 2019 that still
sounds pretty good I mean the demo we just did looked pretty good optained for
the win right well I do love your
optimism remember guys we spoiled the ending earlier and everyone dies but it
doesn't have to be a total loss there's maybe a valuable lesson here for the
industry to maybe learn this time Intel
if you're listening and everyone you need to stop locking your products
because I didn't buy enough of your
products the Cascade Lake CPUs that did
eventually sh with obtaine had two variants a standard version and a large
memory footprint version in the case of the Zeon plattinum 8260 that we've got
in this server The Standard Version supported only 1 tab of RAM a number
that's pretty easy to hit with regular old Dam meaning that if you wanted to
really take advantage of optane you needed the zeeon Platinum 8260 L well I
mean that's no problem right I mean how much more could it
$3,400 oh yeah and since you're buying two of them it's an extra
$6800 before you buy a single flipping
optane module can see why they used L as
the suffix for those adding insult to
injury you know what also happened between 2017 and 2019 while Intel was
struggling to get optane out of the door AMD launched epic Rome and then epic
Milan featuring more cores more memory
channels support for four ttes of RAM
without a silly large memory footprint tax oh and by the way they were also
cheaper this added up to not a whole lot
of people buying optane and Micron who owned the Fab where all the optane was
being built finally said you know what enough is enough it was and still is a
very cool technology but in 2021 Micron figured you know it be a lot cooler how
about not losing 400 million ion dollar a year so one year later Intel killed
optain which um raises one interesting
question why can you still buy it well
about that even though there hasn't been a Fab making the stuff for years now in
20122 Intel revealed that they still had over half a billion dollars of inventory
left over and they haven't exactly been pushing it that hard I mean what is this
pricing Intel do you want this on your books forever
there are some awesome closeout deals out there these 16 gig accelerators are
amazing there are go-to drives for a DIY
Network Appliance or a NZ because they're literally five bucks and opan
features substantially more right endurance than nand which is great if
you want to constantly retain and overwrite comprehensive system logs and
this one on new egg is still among if not the best drive on the market even if
it is starting to show its age in some ways for example it'll have outstanding
latency like we talked about before but it runs at a quarter the maximum speed
of a modern Gen 5 Drive which is a bit of a yikes so in
conclusion Intel do you want this thing back we uh honestly really don't know
what to do with it but I do know how to segue to our sponsor delete me at LMG we
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locking your personal data down if you guys enjoyed this video maybe you
watched the old one where we originally unboxed this Beast it was a lot newer
and less dead then