Intel’s first Optane SSD- 375GB that you can also use as RAM | NotebookReview

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Sorry if old news.

https://arstechnica.com/information...ptane-ssd-375gb-that-you-can-also-use-as-ram/

Intel announced today the first Optane-branded product using its new 3D XPoint memory: the catchily named Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X. It's a 375GB SSD on a PCIe card. Initial limited availability starts today, albeit with no price attached, with broad availability in the second half of the year. In the second quarter, a 750GB PCIe model, and a 375GB model in the U.2 form factor will be released, and in the second half of the year, a 1.5TB PCIe card, and 750GB and 1.5TB U.2 stick, are planned.

3D XPoint is a new kind of persistent solid state memory devised by Intel and Micron. Details on how the memory actually works remain scarce—it's generally believed to use some kind of change in resistance to record data—but its performance characteristics and technical capabilities make it appealing for a wide range of applications.

When it was first announced in 2015, Intel claimed it would be 1,000 times faster than NAND flash, 10 times denser than DRAM, and 1,000 times better endurance than NAND, though without saying "faster at what" or "what kind of NAND" or anything like that. With the shipping product, these comparisons are now clearer, as one of Intel's slides make clear: 3D XPoint has about one thousandth the latency of NAND flash (or about ten times the latency of DRAM), and tens times the density of DRAM.

The raw specs for the P4800X leaked in February. To summarize: it's a datacenter-oriented part, built for applications with high read/write loads, looking for low latency. The sequential transfer rates of 2400MB/s read, 2000MB/s write, are good, but some of the fastest NAND flash can pull slightly ahead. Where the P4800X excels is its ability to sustain high I/O loads, courtesy of those low latencies.

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John.

Tinderbox (UK), Mar 19, 2017

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tilleroftheearth, Papusan, hmscott and 1 other person like this.

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Would YOU pay $1500 for an SSD? Meet the Intel Optane P4800X

Intel Optane DC P4800X SSD & Consumer 3D Crosspoint

Article: http://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/2845-intel-optane-dc-p4800x-ssd

Last edited: Mar 20, 2017

hmscott, Mar 20, 2017

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From the link above from hmscott:

Both systems were being used for rendering a SideFX Houdini demo called Maelstrom. The render is ~7 seconds (168 frames @ 24fps) of 1.1 billion particles all interacting with one another. What’s nice about this complex render is that it quickly exhausts the system memory, thereby forcing the machine to use swap space. The swap space was configured in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS with no special drivers installed on either system. Both machines were using the default NVMe driver to control the drives. Both systems were using X99 chipsets, 64GB of RAM, and 16-threaded CPUs. The end result was the compelling part: Intel 750@17hours, Optane@6 hours to render. Of course, this is a very specific use case, so we’ll have to see how that performance scales to other tasks.

Click to expand...

NOTE: this is not my workload/workflow.

But if a 'mere' $1.5K component got me the same results in a third of the time; I'd be upgrading yesterday.

The fact is that it would be (for most of my workstations...) a new platform, new CPU, new RAM and that additional $$$$ over and above what I am currently running today. The problem? Still not comparable to me for what matters most (capacity). A nominal 375GB drive would be going to circa 2009/2010 with tiny (capacity) vRaptors... That ~2.8x increase in my productivity (if directly applicable, of course) is being hugely chipped away with factors and aspects that would just as dramatically decrease my productivity by just as much or more.

When I can create 350GB of data in as little as 20 images or ~700 raw files... a 375GB capacity drive is more toy than tool. Forget the fact that right in the name it is 'DC' or, data center aimed...

Still, Optane/XPoint is here! Can't wait for more applicable (to me) products from Intel/Micron.

tilleroftheearth, Mar 29, 2017

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Intel’s first Optane SSD: 375GB that you can also use as RAM

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