What is Intel Optane?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
1,191 words · ~5 min read
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by now it's become more or less mainstream to have a solid state drive
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or SSD in your computer or even your phone and why not with their Fast
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Response times and more recently falling
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costs they're often recommended as the best single upgrade the average user can
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make to an older machine but most ssds
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are based on a storage technology called nand flash which has actually been
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around for decades now and as we demand
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faster speeds and storage solutions that can handle tons of requests at once
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which is especially important for all those cloud-based services that we love
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this aging technology will become more
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and more of a bottleneck enter Intel opan a new
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fundamentally different storage Tech based on what Intel is calling 3 Cross
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Point although they're treating exactly
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what sorts of materials they're using in 3D Cross Point and how they're arranged
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as uh top secret what I can tell you is
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that optain has a few major advantages
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first up is latency the delay between an
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IO request and the drive acting on it
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although obtains latency isn't as low as the cash on your CPU or as low as your
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system RAM it is much lower than any of
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these existing storage Technologies and
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yet obtains data density is much higher
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than RAM meaning that it can be deployed
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as either RAM likee working memory or
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even as longer term storage due to its
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combination of quick access times and
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high capacities on the subject of using optained for
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storage to be clear it won't be replacing the mechanical hard drive
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anytime soon but unlike RAM its
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nonvolatility means that it can retain
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data for a relatively long time without
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a constant supply of power and it's faster than even the fastest nand ssds
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across the board including in the small
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random reads and writs at low Q depths that account for the bulk of the average
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person's usage not just in cherry-picked
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benchmarks that don't reflect the real world in fact optane can hit close to
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100,000 iops at a q depth of one and
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over quadruple that at around Q depth 8
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not Q depths of 32 which many SSD makers
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advertise but which virtually never occur in real life optain also provides
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much better quality of service meaning that random dips in performance are far
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less common and it can handle many more transactions per second so performance
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doesn't degrade nearly as much even when the drive is getting slammed with IO
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requests this could end up being very important on the server and Cloud side
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of things meaning like uh video messages
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or controller inputs in Cloud games
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could go in and out more quickly and reliably if these Enterprises started
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using opan and it looks like the technology should catch on due to its
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lower cost per transaction op's ability to be used as
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high-capacity RAM could also make it a compelling solution for things like
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machine learning think about developing software for self-driving cars for
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example and scientific research where having having a large pool of working
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memory is more important than having it be as fast as
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possible but line is come on I'm not a
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scientist researching artificial intelligence I just want to know how I
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can get this stuff in my home battle station well right now the only optained
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product available on the consumer level is an m.2 optained cache solution
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available in 16 or 32 GB capacities that
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places frequently used data like operating system files and save games
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onto the cache automatically which in some situations is faster than running
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things off of an SSD even if your main
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disc that it's accelerating is a mechanical hard drive there is a catch
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though you'll need a supported platform namely a kbl lake or newer CPU and a 200
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series or newer Intel chipset as the company didn't want to do the validation
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and testing on anything older or for that matter anything AMD opting instead
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to tell consumers we know this hardware
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setup will work so use that the good
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news is that this obtained Cash Drive looks like it's going to be supported by
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nearly all major motherboard manufacturers as well as the big boy
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oems like Dell HP and Lenovo and there's
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more good news assuming you've got the
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uh dollar dollar bills there will be a
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full fat obtained storage solution that will
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function as a normal drive over a PCI
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Express slot or a u.2 port without
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needing a specific motherboard though uh
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high-capacity optain drives in an m.2 form factor probably won't be available
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anytime soon due to power and thermal
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concerns so then that's today but opan
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is so fast that it currently s saturates
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a PCI Express 3.0 X4 connection which
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has a theoretical max speed of a little under 4 GB per second so at some point
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we should expect to see new interconnects and protocols that can
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fully harness the potential of optain whether you're modeling the best way to
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