Intel Optane Exclusive Hands On - SSD Crushing Performance
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,244 words · ~6 min read
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Intel sponsored our trip down to their campus in folsom california where we
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will be taking an exclusive look at the latest breakthrough in some super
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awesome cool tech that they're calling their Intel optane technology based on
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3d crosspoint memory media and all this is taking place in advance of you normal
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consumers being able to buy oh wait
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now that i think about it that um that sounds an awful lot like all the
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other coverage of this stuff but no the difference this time is that an opt-in
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memory module like the one i'm holding in my hand will be available for
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purchase in about a month for 50 bucks
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okay so what is an optane memory module
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here's the cliffs notes dram is the super fast storage that
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holds the data that's integral to whatever it is your system is doing at a
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given moment so when you go to launch a web browser or a game a simulation data
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set or video editing program whatever that is where everything gets kept so
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that the program runs smoothly so that's great right let's just put
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let's just put everything in there right wrong wrong wrong wrong
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dram has two major limitations the first
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of which being that dram is very
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expensive you probably have less than a tenth as much dram in your system as you
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have other types of storage and number two is that dram is what's known as
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volatile so that means when the system loses power
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poof the data is gone
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so that is why we have what's known as
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non-volatile storage so this is where your pictures or
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files or anything that you don't want to disappear every time you turn off your
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computer goes and the most common types of non-volatile storage in order of
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speed are the hard disk drive or HDD
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the solid-state disk or SSD with SATA
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interface or more recently an NVMe SSD
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like this 750 series right here
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getting back to optane though 3d crosspoint memory is unlike
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anything we've ever seen before at a die level both its performance and endurance
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exceed even the nand used in the highest end ssds today
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and perhaps even more importantly it has
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only 10 times the access latency as dram
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meaning that it can be used as more of an extension
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of system memory or like a fifth level of CPU cache and it
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can do that without worrying about the
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right cycle limitations or long system stutters or
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delays that would be associated with grabbing data off of a more traditional
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storage device and the real kicker then is this it does all of this stuff while
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being non-volatile the data stays there
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so here is a normal computer Intel did
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provide it but i have checked
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no monkey business 7700k ow z270a i got a water cooler on there
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that uh herpa derp with the uh RAM spacing there
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it's got one fan on it and uh you gotta what is that gtx 1080 and uh three
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terabyte wd blue hard drive
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so in summary then this small 16 or 32
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gig stick sits somewhere between your ddr4 RAM and
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your mechanical hard drive so i'm thinking
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kind of there but no not really acting as a way
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faster data cache allowing application launch times and system responsiveness
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up to several times faster and this time
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Intel claims although we've all heard this before that it's easy
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so let's try it out then shall we oh
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action rule yes
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here we go and here's the performance of a normal
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computer if you can call it that i mean i'm not just talking
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boot times like click on things how long you wait oh
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okay so now we're gonna put in the Intel optane
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memory module let's shut this baby down eventually
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at this time that requires a seventh generation
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core series processor and a 200 series desktop motherboard
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you find an available m.2 slot so here's
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there's actually two on this motherboard screw it in
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and boop there it is
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about 3.7 gigabytes per second of theoretical bandwidth to our memory
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that's awkward i was like there's no button there
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finally we reboot and we're actually going to be measuring
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this even though we are not expecting there to be any significant difference
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in boot time since the optane memory module hasn't had a chance to cache
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anything yet and hypothesis confirmed it is
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marginally faster but there's also significant variance once you factor in
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waiting for all this crap to load up when you boot up Windows
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and for that matter this is true for
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everything we ran after initially installing the optane
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memory module on the second run
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now we're talking here optane is starting to flex its muscles a little
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bit game loading times are not affected as much but boot times and application
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load times are noticeably
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snappier for our third run ignoring the margin of
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error inherent and relying on my fingers to press a stopwatch overall the results
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look pretty darn similar to the third and still very good
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so that was really cool but with that said i don't think anybody
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at Intel is trying to convince the enthusiast user who wants to give them
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700 for a 1.2 terabyte NVMe SSD to throw
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that junk in the garbage and run out and buy a big old hard drive and strap a 16
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or 32 gig opt-in module to it instead no
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i think the pitch here is that in a typical consumer workload
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the optane module can hold enough of the
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operating system and program data to
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achieve SSD like responsiveness at a
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lower cost without manually using
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frequently used data around like many users with SSD boot drives and HDD
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storage drives have to deal with today
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so this tech was already capable of
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measurable noticeable improvements to system
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responsiveness back when it was called srt and it used slower lower endurance
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nand flash in order to accelerate the computing experience
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so what we're looking at now then is a way for Intel to take everything that
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they learned about intelligently caching data for the user and give it the low
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latency high endurance and simplicity
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that it always i guess needed to really
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shine so a huge shout out to Intel for sponsoring this video bringing us down
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here to exclusively bring you this hands-on experience with their optane
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memory module thanks to you guys for watching and as always if you dislike
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the video you know what to do but if you liked it hit that like button get
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subscribed leave a comment letting me know what do you guys
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think of this would you use optane to accelerate a boot volume would you use
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it to accelerate even a secondary storage volume
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what do you want to see this technology in because i can tell you
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this is not the last we've seen of it and finally check out at the link in the
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video description where to buy the stuff we featured our merch store and our
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community forum i'll see you guys later