that right there is a 512
Gigabyte dim inside this box
is a server with somewhere in the neighborhood
of three to six terabytes of memory
sort of this gives it the capability to run workloads like simulations with
never-before-seen complexity without suffering large performance penalties
for swapping data in and out of its bulk
storage mostly now they're really savvy among
you probably already have an idea of what's in here but for everyone else
let me tell you something what if i said that you could take an
SSD and put it right into your system memory slot instead of RAM
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learn more now i'm not really expecting this thing
to look unusual but
it is a very very unusual
accessory kit
whatever this is what the hell is this
on the one end it looks like a little tiny pci express six pin and on the
other end it looks like a little tiny zeta connector
what the heck it's labeled odd so optical drive
what does this thing have an optical drive you're gonna be kidding me
oh wow it's a skinny boy
it's a 1u so this is a super slim server designed to be rack mounted with very
high densities oh it's heavier than it looks uh one second
all right is there anything else important in here let's go with no sweet ah
okay oh somebody voided the warranty before i
got to it you know i was wondering why it comes with a safety data sheet and a
big warning label on the side turns out it's got a lithium battery
a cr whatever you know one of those little button cells for making sure the
BIOS doesn't lose its data while the system is powered off
naturally a server has a very different port configuration compared to a desktop
or a workstation so back here we've got a couple pci express slots what looks
like some kind of mezzanine car will have to pop it open three usb 3s that's
it and then four network ports one of which is for management so you can
actually perform BIOS updates install operating systems all that kind of low
level stuff monitor temperatures and fans and all
that good stuff over the network rather than being plugged in directly if you do
need to plug in directly of course it's got vga out so you can get that graphics
you know connection on there
for storage what are we looking at here oh wow
oh they went and they put some good stuff in here neat
well we've got at least two of Intel's dc p46 10 NVMe ssds
so that's cool that answers my question as to whether
these were NVMe or SATA base more envy oh
no so these are higher capacity lower
performance 4610s these are SATA
it has taken all of my self-control to not open this thing up yet i actually
don't even know exactly what CPU is in this freaking thing
in fact okay that's interesting i didn't know
that there were two cpus in this thing
we requested a demo unit back in july so
i'm thinking they are probably
cascade lake cpus with barlow pass dimms
but they could also be first gen apache pass dimms which are about 80 percent as
performant to be clear they're still going to be pretty flipping high
performance and i'm expecting them to be
pretty high capacity let's have a look here
oh oh my check this out ladies and gentlemen
that right there is a 512
Gigabyte dim but notice that i didn't say 512
Gigabyte memory module if you look closely at all the memory
that's stacked up in this thing well do the math if all of these were 512 gigs
that would be 12 terabytes of memory that's more than these xeon cpus even
support so if you look closely check this out
half of them are traditional ddr4 memory
modules so these ones right here 32 gig
ecc registered dimms from micron and the
other half are this this is Intel's dc pmm or data center
persistent memory module and on these
it is not dram there's no memory on them i mean there's
memory in the sense that you can like store things on them and the system can
work with that data but no dram memory
so it actually uses the same optane chips that you would find in something
like a high performance storage drive or
one of those little obtain memory modules that Intel sells as like a nitro
boost for your mechanical hard drive
oh dear lord no
oh my god how much does it cost wow what a good question um well i think i found
a four pack of these modules for nine grand
uh so we have 12 of them
just under 30 dollars for the optane modules alone got probably
another couple grand in regular memory let's call it 30 grand total in memory
depending on what cpus these are they could be anywhere from you know five to
ten grand each i think it's pretty safe to say that
this whole thing is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 60 000 us dollars
so no Intel will not be leaving it with us but we get to play with it
it's just trippy you know like it's not that often that i encounter hardware so
high end that i'm just like
but like look at this these are pci express 24x slots ever seen one of those
unless you're in the server space stop probably not i mean they've got them
just adapted to 16x slots but these
expansion slots right here or this ocp
mezzanine spot right here could be used for like super high speed networking um
what else we got oh i answered my question from earlier it looks like
these four slots are actually configured for SATA only based on the connectors
that are in them but i'm
not sure if yeah if you had another board or used a pci express slot it
looks like the backplane does support NVMe just uh it's a universal backplane
but it's not u.3 so you can't just plug in either kind of drive regardless
of what it's hooked up to okay should we power it on
no we shouldn't actually what we should talk about is
how these memory modules are used so
there's a couple of different ways that they can be configured either in app
direct mode where the system actually recognizes the dim as persistent storage
just like a regular SSD but connected to
a high-speed memory interface directly to the CPU
or they can operate in memory mode where the system recognizes them as very very
high capacity memory modules and uses them in exactly the same way now as you
guys can imagine intercompatibility of a memory slot
between dram and storage chips is not
the kind of thing that happens overnight it was actually three and a half years
ago that i first attended an octane briefing at Intel's folsom campus the
idea seemed pretty sound optane comes in
here with lower capacities and higher cost than the nand that's traditionally
found in solid state drives but then higher capacities and lower cost
relative to dram which is what you would normally find on a memory module as for
performance they projected latencies somewhere in between the two but closer
to dram than to nand and the pricing at
least has somewhat held true in the real world i found that it's a little under
half the price of a memory module and
definitely available at higher capacities it should be noted though that these you know retail online prices
are rarely what would be paid by an actual enterprise or a data center
customer oh i didn't really think of this before we fire this up i'm kind of
going to need a boot drive so i'll have to run and grab an m.2 to throw in here
and that's not as crazy as it sounds i mean yes i know Linus this thing is full
of storage why don't you just install an os on it and off you go well
that's not really how a device like this is intended to be used i know it does
have terabytes of storage in both the bays at the front and the memory slots
but this is more of a compute node and
all these tiers of storage are meant to keep the CPU chock full of data to
crunch so that it can run at peak efficiency so you've actually got five
tiers of storage in here you've got the sram so that's your cache on the CPU
you've got your dram which is in half of these memory slots you've got your
octane memory so that's in the other half you've got your NVMe ssds over here
and then finally you've got your SATA ssds over here so whatever the CPU needs
the quickest access to stays closest to it and whatever is less important falls
away onto these slower tiers oh wait
it's not that loud because it's not actually on
fans are powered up even before you turn it on
here we go
that's actually quieter than i expected
it's pretty good oh there it goes
hey it survived
dropping into the BIOS we're running xeon platinum 8260ls and this poor thing
has no idea what's going on with the memory here it's like oh yeah you got uh
three terabytes of RAM except that if we pop in here ah yes
these are the real numbers 384 gigs of
dram and six terabytes of Intel's optane persistent
memory modules now BIOS optimizations to
make this work are important both your settings
and your vendor firmware lenovo seems to recommend anywhere from a 1 to 4 to 1 to
16 ratio of dram to persistent memory
depending on what you're doing and as for Intel's guidance they say that
applications like redis imdb run well with an eight to one config while legacy
databases like microsoft sql runs ideal
in like a four to one config there's also times where two to one works best
if you want to minimize cache misses so that's times when the CPU is trying to
find something in dram but it's already been demoted to persistent memory
i mean this is mind-blowing to me like my mind
was already blown way back in the athlon xp days when i found out that you could
run dual channel with three sticks
if you have one high capacity stick and then two half capacity sticks i was like
what this another level of mind blown totally
different capacities and not even the same kinds of chips on the dimms that's
hilarious this thing is so not designed to boot
off of a local drive my m.2 showed up as
UEFI miscellaneous device in the boot options it was configured to boot from
network which makes way more sense but hopefully it'll do it my poor SSD is
like what is this stuff
we might have to do a fresh install i've got some drivers on this thing that are
not playing nicely AMD ryzen
masterdriver.sis crashed
it was on an AMD system before just installed chipset drivers
so everything is picking up correctly now
here's what i want to know though when i open up task manager
what am i going to see
aha okay so we got 48 CPU cores yeah that's
all as expected pretty sweet and we got
two terabytes apparently of memory
with 4.3 terabytes hardware reserved
for 6.3 terabytes how does this math work
from what i can glean our persistent memory modules seem to be just operating
as expanded system memory but even within that mode there are multiple
modes so there's a bandwidth optimized mode and a latency optimized mode and
then Intel actually came out with a balanced mode after launch that they
said works pretty darn well where it uses the dram as a cache and then the
optane persistent memory as like a large dumping ground giving you dram like
performance depending on the workload even though optane is an order of
magnitude slower in terms of latency
now obviously benchmarking something like this isn't as simple as firing up
cinebench and being like yeah you know
it's really good it's really fast or it's not very good so guys stay tuned
this is just the unboxing making sure it works oh my gosh this thing's crazy and
Anthony or Jake is probably going to end up putting this thing through its paces
over the next little while which raises the question what kind of benchmarks
would they even run who's the audience for this well if you had a very large database
that you wanted to run in memory for extreme performance you could run it in
memory mode if for whatever reason you needed extremely fast storage like a
really fast storage device you could run it in storage mode or block mode
i mean yeah you could also just use optane in
an NVMe device like what we've actually got installed on the front here but the
advantage in this case is that instead of contending with pci express
which is going to be a bottleneck depending what you're doing and an NVMe
protocol that was designed first and foremost for nand you're communicating
with your storage over the much faster memory interface that's built right into
the CPU but get this it's not all boring
stuff like that in 2019 you can see we're just running Windows 10 here guys
microsoft rolled support for this product into Windows 10 allowing it to
be used for rendering simulation and scientific
tasks that are certainly heavy but not
necessarily in the data center so workstations with multiple terabytes of
RAM that could be very interesting for a lot
of people now dims with persistent storage already
exist they're called envy dim but the difference is that instead of having
high speed dram and then slower nand that it can flush to when it's powered
off this is just all optane all the time thanks to its much higher
rate endurance so that's it for today that's the
introduction to this tech holy is it ever cool and we're gonna have a follow
up for you guys where we really put it through its paces and this video is
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or through our link in the video description if you guys enjoyed this
video maybe check out our last big server upgrade series petabyte project
who where we rolled out a petabyte of storage in a single 4u enclosure that's
just four times the thickness of this one and we did it twice