The silliest part of optane was it reached a point where 32GB RAM sticks were cheaper than 16GB optane modules when bought new. I REALLY wanted an nvme optane ssd on my laptop that'd be dedicated memory just for heavy database workloads but it made more sense to upgrade to 64GB of RAM.
If they licensed the tech for other companies to make and manufacturer it, it would have gotten much wider adoption. Imagine is samsung or others used their fabs to make it. Huge money savings
It feels to me like a big part of Optane's problem, was a lack of advancement from when it initially released. The technologies it meant to be sitting in the middle of the stack between kept advancing faster than Optane could keep up. I don't know how much of that was due to being hamstrung by being tied to this one fab, or a lack of investment in research, but it was simply too stagnant. I do hope in the future someone will take up the torch of fast byte-addressable persistent storage.
4:40 IM Flash was in Lehi, Utah (pronounced lee-high not let-ee). It's quickly been changing hands. In 2019, IM Flash was disbanded and it just became Micron Technology Utah. Then, the fab was purchased by Texas Instruments just last year.
Honestly, targeting and marketing Optane as an intermediate between SSD and RAM might've been a death sentence. Too small a niche and price bracket sandwiched by rapidly improving, far more mature technologies. Not to mention the complex, Intel-only support for PMem.
It also didn't help that AMD server-chips became quite successful and will support WAAAAYYYYY more DDR3/4/5 memory (even the cheap chips support up to multiple TBs) compared to what Intel was offering, with its “wonderful” Xeon product differentiation.
@@JLGBinken Yup. I also don't think 512GB per DIMM for PMem was compelling enough density-wise, and at current prices 256GB DDR4 can be found for similar prices to 256GB PMem. Maybe they just couldn't manage it for gen2, but if they'd been able to go all the way up to 4TB modules (via DDR, CXL, or whatever low-latency interface), then we'd be talking 16x density instead of 2x.
What a bummer Intel did it to themselves NVDIMMS / PMDIMMS are amazing and would have been the future of laptops and server computing but Intel roadblocked themselves, limited their use cases themselves and then locked down the PMDIMMS to Intel only systems the same way NVDIMMS are locked down due to their insane hidden costs.
What they needed was a dedicated Optane bus with its own dedicated busses. Instead they limited it by requiring the CPU to access it through the DDR PHY. CPUs since Skylake have had their own dedicated Optane controller, but it was just never used…
Thanks Ian, please do a video on the Sapphire Rapids delay. It's very disappointing that Optane is biting the dust. As an employee of SAP, Optane PMEM was touted to us as a game changer for our SAP HANA in-memory Database. Now our Customers and us are left in limbo.
Sometimes we have to accept the harsh reality that no matter how cool and desirable a piece to technology is, it may not always be viable from a business stand point.
I’m on the consulting side and not involved in product development and I don’t have full visibility on what’s to come. From what I’ve heard, HANA heavily relies/uses Intel specific instructions and hence hasn’t been certified for AMD Epyc. AMD Epyc certification may happen in the future.
@@srikanthramanan I run a data center with all AMD Epyc CPUs on VMware. We do a lot of hosting for customer DEV/Demo SAP systems and that includes HANA. A few years ago I ran the HANA PRD performance test that can be used to certify hardware that isn't on the HCL. Our Epyc Rome and Naples systems passed with flying colors. I think the entire Intel Specific Instructions is nothing more than marketing saying "Intel has given us a boat load of money to keep this Intel only." @Zbigniew I would have loved to have it certified going back to Rome. AMD with the 8 channel DDR4 made a huge difference in RAM density compared to Intel. Now with ICL & SPR Intel has only gotten to 8 channel and FINALLY gotten rid of the L series CPUs to allow all their CPUs to access the full amount of RAM. However, once again Intel is behind the 8 ball in terms of density compared to AMD. With Genoa AMD is going to 12 channel RAM when Intel is still at 8 channel. When you are doing virtualization, RAM is much more important that physical cores when you are running dual socket 32c/64t CPUs. All my hosts have 1TB RAM and I wish I had another TB/host. CPU over provisioning by 25-30% or more is pretty easy when you have that many cores as the odds of not having available cores and a VM waiting for CPU is quite small. However, RAM over provisioning can have a MASSIVE performance impact at just 10% to the point that VMs crash.
The other way round. Intel is now sitting on some juicy patents with this and will sue anyone who attempts to bring something similar (and possibly better) to market.
@n n I don't think Intel did a good job of explaining what it is or putting it in a form that people wanted. It's definitely desirable but you think you already have it when you buy a normal SSD, you don't have what Optane provides.
@n n Yes, terrible marketing. I've often tried to improve computers using caching or small SSDs but the economic of this are poor and getting worse. First of all fit a decent amount of RAM that speeds up disk activity due to not using the disk as a substitute for RAM. Secondly have a large SSD for the OS or everything if you can afford that. Finally use the hard drive for bulk. Optane does fit in here but as the operating system drive rather than some kind of cache.
@n n In terms of what you'd want from solid state storage Optane has it, assuming it was bigger and cheaper. Nand Flash is a really messy compromise that only works because it's bigger and cheaper. Without all the go faster trickery added to it it's slow. Optane is naturally fast and does not wear out.
@@squelchedotter They didn't really squander it. There was nothing to squander. It was an experimental architecture for which the necessary clever compilers were impossible to write, and was more of a f***-up that took way longer to die than it should have.
We really wanted to get Optane memory. I wanted our databases to be on it. But it is simply too expensive for what it does. Instead, we just bought 1TB of RAM instead. The tradeoffs are better for that than Optane. We cached the whole database in RAM, more or less. Longer starting time, but I will take that.
It's pronounced Lee-high instead of Leh-he. I was at BYU in Provo and at STEM Fairs Micron would come and really push for interns or full time engineers to come and work at the plant. They had marketing material and everything, and the idea at the time was to speed up slow hard drives, which made sense at the time when ssds were still somewhat expensive
In my opinion the constant delays of Xeon SP killed optane. It wasn't too early it was too late. When it was initially planned to release there was no CXL and nand flash was still expensive and the write endurance was an issue. Now the price premium cannot be justified.
Was part of the Optane problem the software stack, was the software just to slow. I did see that level1tech video about intel redoing the driver stack and got massive gains. Optane, I always wanted to use you but never had the chance. RIP 2022.
I was genuinely excited for the 3DxPoint stuff years ago, imagine no need for mass storage via NVMe, SATA or SAS for Workstations and NV storage via memory slotted in DIMM.
there's always a need for storage. You can't load everything on the internet in local memory. Sadly, looks like HBM2 is also heading to the same outcome. Apple didn't use HBM memory to achieve the same throughput using LPDDR5X
@@RunForPeace-hk1cu Yes, there is always a need for more storage. What I meant was for something like a local machine/workstation, a few hundred gigs to a few terabytes (based 2) having as fast as RAM non-volatile storage is a good thing. Having it lower/faster latency or similarly as low/fast latency as well is also good. Completely side stepping the need for another layer of cache (RAM in this case) can be beneficial for more speed and efficiency, especially when RAM needs continuous power to keep state compared to, well... non-volatile.
For completeness I feel you need to do a deep dive into HPs 'The Machine' and its Memristor memory technology. Its birth, gestation and then quietly being announced as dead on arrival as well, in not so many words. 😄
Ah, so that’s what it was called. I was trying to remember the name but all I could think of was “The Cube” or “The Solid” or something along those lines.
It was clear from the start it would fail! As the whole idea was terrible and guided by a blind ideology. That is, removing the distinction between the persisted state and the working state. Every tech/product that tries this, will fail. Only those that trust hard-and software to never produce any error, or otherwise unwanted result, believe it will work and try to make it!
Intel had squandered Optane by making it only a glorified HDD cache for consumers and Intel exclusive. Had they opened the tech to AMD and let it compete as an SSD, they would have probably been more successful.
Bit late to this, but we invested HEAVILY on optaine, and intels sudden cancellation of it has caused a headache of huge proportions. All the servers were gonna now HAVE to scrapp because we can no long rely on the supply chains. Invested since 2016 - 18.72 Million Scrap Value Today - Shreddies. Still I can finally get rid of the last of our intel systems.
The processor cache, would be the new RAM, for intake from the SSD array. You'd have terabytes of accessible memory from a Raid array of many PCI-E lanes. (All of it, nearly at once.) The RAM would do write caching and when data change is pending.
I know you're going to say RAM can give you the data sooner. If it has it, sure. But Terabytes of all data being accessible, is a total game changer. CPU cache will be a factor.
4:40 *Lehi ("Lee-hi"), Utah; not "Leti/Lehee". That once "IM Flash" fab is literally blocks from my house. Texas Instruments owns it now and makes analog semi's there.
I would've loved a nice Optane setup. I have ideas for other ways of running it than the Memory and App Direct modes with the kernel just allowing two different mmap for RAM vs. Optane mapping. Allowing it to work like normal memory but with the application deciding what goes where
Abstraction? folks: Cache is like your nightstand where you put what you are currently reading, your personal library/bookcase are more like ram, the public library is your Hard Drive.
Pity they haven't tried going with an altered use-case - instead of developping CPUs which work with DIMM slots they could have prepared a more SoC comprehensive package with eg. 32-128+GB of "on package" high speed memory, eg. HBMe, for the compute intensive layer of data storage with the DIMMs delegaated to serving the purpose of NVDIMMs/Optane DCPDIMMs for slightly slower but larger mem pools and/or fast storage, whilst delegating all the PCIe lanes to extra controllers/accelerators/functionalities... a kind of a switch or shift in technological stacks that could have made success or at least that could have questioned the status quo. Heck, maybe somewhere down the line nVidia decides to buy the IP and they manage to extend their Grace+Hopper product stack with the proviso of the high speed RAM on package that's vastly superior to DIMMs, which then would serve the purpose of large mem pool providers for the compute intensive workloads DC (and possibly workstation) businesses are targeting.
I send my condolescence to pmem. Near-RAM latency and byte addressibility has some potential if only the price had not been this ridiculous. Its use cases are very narrow for this price point. The pmem will be back some day when its killer application rises and that market becomes big enough to lure competition from big players.
I hope Intel licence they patents for 3D X point technology, because for me this technology don't get enough development to take place, and where are places (specialized) where it would be much better than flash.
@n n do you even know what is different in this technology compare to flash (NAND)? It more similar to transition from vacuum tubes to transistors, than from DUV to EUV. Ofc maybe it would never perform as we hope, but without research you will never know. And a lot of performance we know left on table, if I remember correctly they don't even go to read full line, only one cell at once.
I would use RAM as a write cache, for a RAID NVME SSD primary access point. Data processing would be orders of magnitude higher. More cores, more PCI-E lanes.
Ever since I heard about Optane years ago when it was first introduced, I’ve always suspected that it wasn’t going to go anywhere and would eventually disappear. I think that the major problem was that your average person, and even your average PC enthusiast, just didn’t really understand it. Intel did a lousy job of marketing that technology. Year after year, it remained a mystery to most folks, and so there was never a grassroots buy-in for it.
Optane initially sounds amazing, but as it's slower than DRAM and data centres keep servers up, running, it seems too niche to gain the scale necessary in the market to be viable. You can memory map in data from disk files for example, write accelerators can use battery backed DRAM, SSDs can save state powered by capacitors. So it really needed to deliver on the speed, density and cost hype; while also being ultra reliable. That sounds like a tall order for a new product facing mature technologies with much more R&D behind them.
Lookup Intel Terahertz, 1000GH CPU with 10,000 times less leakage, lower power and ran cooler with their "special sauce" they said. Yet 21 years later it's still not used?
A real myriad of issues that plagued such a great technology :( Would've been incredible if 3DXPoint could've continued development. The IOPs, latency, and endurance were truly incredible. Tons of issues with the Micron agreement on the fab you mentioned and all sorts of development issues in general...
If it was cheaper than dram, then licensing it out to ssd manufactures to use optane chips instead of dram would have been neat. It's pretty sad its coming to a close, it had a lot of potential. Would have loved a large ssd like that I could hammer away at and never kill.
IDK, are high optane fuels really worth the cost? I heard somewhere you can add your own additives to your gas tank to make it high optane, the brand I was recommended was called liquid shwartz and when put in an electric camper van makes it go plad.
Only couple of year's i wanted an Optane module to speed up my HDDs. Because at this time, a big ssd was much to expensive for me. Then came amd with it's software solution , where you could use every cheap small 128GB SSD to speed up the HDD by using it as cache. This I also didn't by ;-) At the end (four years later) I bought my new PC with a real 500GB ssd, and since then (2018?), i use only SSD in PCs, and HDDs in the NAS :-)
I would use RAM as a write cache, for a RAID NVME SSD primary access point. Data processing would be orders of magnitude higher. More cores, more PCI-E lanes.
The processor cache, would be the new RAM, for intake from the SSD array. You'd have terabytes of accessible memory from a Raid array of many PCI-E lanes. (All of it, nearly at once.) The RAM would do write caching and when data change is pending.
@@TechTechPotato Why did Intel push the 16gig cache drives so hard, despite desktop users wanting SSDs? These drivers work wonders in games such as Star Citizen..
Seems to me Intel was lying to investors about Optane's future even after Micron sold Lehi Utah fab to Texas Instruments. Instead of coming clean, they perpetuated this ambiguity for almost a year.
There where plain and simply no good software ideas on the operating system level allowed to come through inside intel to make this kind of persistent memory to come through and become commonly used. Pricing was far too high, and performance turned out to be not really competitive. Huge clients avoided jet another attempt to get them on to a proprietary leash like the DDR-T stuff. However still the main reason why this technologie died was the fact that the technology turned out to not being able to compete with the advances in flash memory.
It's very disappointing that Intel is killing this because it was killer in homelab NASes. I was just finishing my undergrad when I hear they're discontinuing optane. Hope there's still enough on the market that I can buy some when I have a real job
They should have targeted just replacing NAND flash completly, which simplify a lot of things. But to do that you need big capacity and low cost. Another option would be to use it as a journal or write ahead log for file system or databases, accelerating writes, but then you could do the same with just RAM and battery backup. Also now it is killed, it would be nicest if they open all related patents.
I was excited to see some enterprise database performance benefit, but the stuff that really helps the performance tends to be just fine with volatile memory.
Optane had a future... but not now. If it was being developed 10 years ealier then it would be able to compete but when they were so late into this game then cost wasn't adequate to performence gained. Especially when I didn't actually hear about this till it died.
Optane should have been a "Prosumer" type of product that boosted SSDs performance. For enterprise a drop in replacement for RAM at half the cost and no worry for power loss would have been an amazing value. You wouldn't have to keep every single server on a UPS.
Optane missed interconnect to cpu. DDR4/5 development took way too long (on memorycontroller/firmwarw side?) and killed it. Nvme is too slow because irq and os-software overheads. And now CXL could finally provide way to utilise pcie without overheads. Sad
I don’t understand why they don’t license the technology out if they were to kill the tech.. this will revolutionize this entire industry, and they can make tons
Good idea, a niche product that was hobbled by an Intel lock in. Add the massive investments into DRAM and flash manufacturing and R&D that weren't available for Optane because of the proprietary lock in, it just got crunched from products from both sides. Even if it were not locked into the Intel ecosystem, the success of an Optane like product would not be guaranteed... it's just that the proprietary ness of it definitely guaranteed its death.
@@Raivo_K the Optane SSDs were crippled by the i/o bottleneck, the promise was near DRAM latency and speed nanoseconds, not microseconds going through an OS stack designed for disk drives.
Memory mapping in data from persistent memory is interesting, but as it requires software changes and the main advantage is persistence at cost of speed, I guess most people will simply stick with RAM and precautions against power failure. The cost advantage they promised in the initial hype simply was not delivered; that would be key to wide adoption but overcoming the economies of scale in DRAM & NAND was a tall order.
Would have liked it in my personal rig but the price was insane while persistent memory was not available. It was either get a 32GB optane SSD to "speedup" a HDD, or get a 250 GB SSD and still use it to speed up the HDD or just directly use it. We would have liked it at work but again - was not available for laptops, hard to get for servers and then they cut it off. We have workloads that do only sporadically requires loading a lot of data - right now this is all on normal SSDs and you get significant slowdowns but adding more memory is just not worth it (direct costs as well as power) or for the bigger instalments just not possible (1.5TB limit).
Looked all over the internet & couldn't find a clear answer to my question. Hoping you might shed some light. I've decided to try to breathe some new life into my laptop that has only 8 GB soldered RAM by adding the Optane Memory Series (what you call cache drive) into a second M.2 slot for multitasking: Chrome/Adobe Acrobat/Office running all the time in parallel eating up all my memory. I wanted to get the 32GB version of the Optane Memory but bumped into this on a non-Intel website & couldn't find a confirmation or disproof of it anywhere else: "You must use the M10 version of Optane Memory. The original version of Optane Memory will only be supported in a desktop environment". Do you happen to know whether a non-M10 Optane Memory Series drive should work on a laptop? If not, I'll have to stick to the 16GB version as supplies are scarce at this point. Thanks in advance! P.s. I know Intel has stopped supporting this product for consumers & am ready to experiment with setting this thing up. P.p.s. thanks for the video!
Any size M.2 drive that physically fits will work, whatever capacity of drive. They say that only the 16 GB is supported on the basis of their validation and guarantee, but the beauty of open standards is that whatever conforms to the standard should work effortlessly. But just to confirm here - the Optane cache drive won't add DRAM - it'll just be seen as another storage device. Intel called it 'optane memory', but it's just storage. Might as well add in 1TB M.2 drive.
With cheap Optane modules available and all new motherboards featuring a ton of NVME slots, I was looking forward to building a new 13th Gen system using it and really tweaking a 13600k system for productivity. Will 13th gen support Optane still ? or is it dead on the desktop now also ?
I think they just mis-marketed it, too expensive. It could have been in every sever by now, if they were not so arrogant in their marketing departments. Good engineers get shafted again by idiots in suits.
it was said by intel that it would be cheap & fast, but when the suits saw how fast (10ns) it was, they $$$$$$$, and started to make bad business decisions for the product.
Actually Its also the best for recording streams.... Quite decent for 4k raw and compression after that to clear the disk.. Doesnt bottleneck like an ssd
Seems like Optane was in a really awkward spot: Existing software is optimized for slow SSDs/fast RAM, and cannot easily take advantage of an Optane intermediate layer without serious adaptions. But, no-one is going to do these optimizations, if Optane is not already a well-established technology... Intel should have probably focused on those handful of niche-cases where the Optane benefit is largest, and then try to expand from there, instead of this mixed strategy they seem to have done here.
Add-in card SSD's did not require any special layers or optimization. These work well even on the newest Ryzen systems. Cache models require primocache and DIMM's are not compatible anyway.
It is a cool technology that could possibly return in the future, but I think that’s improbable. It’s more likely that MRAM or another technology will come out that provides the features with a lower price and/or better performance. Intel has been good at developing cutting edge technologies, but not good at bringing commodity products to mass markets. This is yet another example. Had they licensed this technology to other fabs and their CPU/Chipset competitors, it might have succeeded. They tried to keep it proprietary for competitive advantages…and lost.
While I understand why it's happening (pmem was the wrong pivot) the fact that this kills low latency spectacular random performance storage makes me very sad. Kioxia's XL-Flash is good, but I don't see a future where this propagates down to consumer level products. Now I just hope there will be some sort of P5800X fire sale that happens since it appears to be the best storage device for the foreseeable future.
Optane? More like NOPtane!!! Optane? More like Floptane!! Optane? More like Nonane (that's a chemistry one)!! Optane failed, I guess there was too much resistance in the market! Intel might be mourning the loss of optane, or should I say poptane! As the market is now and truly popped, like a Canadian kangaroo jumping on glass globe of unity. And now let us mourn with the national anthem of the UAE - Britney Spears - "i'm a slave 4 u"
Why would they just outright cancel it vs create a roadmap to slowly unwind it, so their Optane users / partners can plan around that. Seems very uniliteral, how many times can Intel burn their user base before it comes back and bite them. They must have stockpiles of Optane products, since it wasn't selling that well im sure.
I was always wondering what would happend if Intel put Optane on an ARC card and let it rip in some simulations or something. Alas, they may both end up relegated to the history books. Such a shame.
I have been puzzling on this too, & am convinced the reason is entirely consistent w/ Intels wider seld destructive management policies. This "tooth paste company" has not been interested in purveying new tech, but in Machiavellian marketing. IE., not to purvey excellent Optane, but to use Optane exclusivity, to force buyers to expensively purchase Xeon. This is one of many examples of how their sleazy methods have backfired on them. We dont know it was expensive. We only know Intel's prices were high. It seems most likely it was an excellent product which should have been a hit for both intel & IT, but Intel's Chief Jocks snatched defeat from the jaws of victory yet again.
Tbh, Intel's old tick-tok legacy era 2 gen platform change is no more price/performance competitive at this moment given the long term stable platform offerings by the AMD.
3DxPoint never looked like a viable product to me. I remember Linus Tech Tips tried using it as memory, and it was much slower than actual ram. So it doesn't work as ram replacement. If it doesn't do that, then it's just really fast SSD. Most NVME SSD are fast enough for consumer and probably majority of commercial systems too, so 3DxPoint is left without a market.
I'd be using Optane for my mass storage if it were even only 1/4 the price it is now, but $4000 for 1.6TB? Too hard to swallow given that I'm not wealthy.
The silliest part of optane was it reached a point where 32GB RAM sticks were cheaper than 16GB optane modules when bought new. I REALLY wanted an nvme optane ssd on my laptop that'd be dedicated memory just for heavy database workloads but it made more sense to upgrade to 64GB of RAM.
They're selling for like five bucks on eBay out of China.
@@aarrondias9950 you signing up to put 5 dollar china special ebay components in your PC?
@@Adierit already have. I've had no issues with em either.
@@Adierit Different purpose different solution. I would not mind to store my Japanese love action videos on those cheapo hardware.
If they licensed the tech for other companies to make and manufacturer it, it would have gotten much wider adoption. Imagine is samsung or others used their fabs to make it. Huge money savings
It feels to me like a big part of Optane's problem, was a lack of advancement from when it initially released. The technologies it meant to be sitting in the middle of the stack between kept advancing faster than Optane could keep up. I don't know how much of that was due to being hamstrung by being tied to this one fab, or a lack of investment in research, but it was simply too stagnant.
I do hope in the future someone will take up the torch of fast byte-addressable persistent storage.
That actually makes a lot of sense.
Especially as they couldn't fully leverage the tech due to connection tech limitations.
4:40
IM Flash was in Lehi, Utah (pronounced lee-high not let-ee).
It's quickly been changing hands. In 2019, IM Flash was disbanded and it just became Micron Technology Utah.
Then, the fab was purchased by Texas Instruments just last year.
How is Utah if I moved get out of California as a IT Tech Manager/Software DevOps guy?
Honestly, targeting and marketing Optane as an intermediate between SSD and RAM might've been a death sentence. Too small a niche and price bracket sandwiched by rapidly improving, far more mature technologies. Not to mention the complex, Intel-only support for PMem.
It also didn't help that AMD server-chips became quite successful and will support WAAAAYYYYY more DDR3/4/5 memory (even the cheap chips support up to multiple TBs) compared to what Intel was offering, with its “wonderful” Xeon product differentiation.
@@JLGBinken Yup. I also don't think 512GB per DIMM for PMem was compelling enough density-wise, and at current prices 256GB DDR4 can be found for similar prices to 256GB PMem. Maybe they just couldn't manage it for gen2, but if they'd been able to go all the way up to 4TB modules (via DDR, CXL, or whatever low-latency interface), then we'd be talking 16x density instead of 2x.
@@JLGBinken "and will support WAAAAYYYYY more DDR3/4/5 memory"
Sure. Source?
@@ABaumstumpf Just look at and compare the specs.
@@flashmozzg So no actual argument just making shit up - you do you.
What a bummer Intel did it to themselves NVDIMMS / PMDIMMS are amazing and would have been the future of laptops and server computing but Intel roadblocked themselves, limited their use cases themselves and then locked down the PMDIMMS to Intel only systems the same way NVDIMMS are locked down due to their insane hidden costs.
Yield were probably horrifyingly bad
What they needed was a dedicated Optane bus with its own dedicated busses. Instead they limited it by requiring the CPU to access it through the DDR PHY. CPUs since Skylake have had their own dedicated Optane controller, but it was just never used…
Thanks Ian, please do a video on the Sapphire Rapids delay. It's very disappointing that Optane is biting the dust. As an employee of SAP, Optane PMEM was touted to us as a game changer for our SAP HANA in-memory Database. Now our Customers and us are left in limbo.
This is major for Oracle and VMware customers as well, sad days
Sometimes we have to accept the harsh reality that no matter how cool and desirable a piece to technology is, it may not always be viable from a business stand point.
What about certifying SAP Hana on AMD ? Genoa seems to have cxl memory included
I’m on the consulting side and not involved in product development and I don’t have full visibility on what’s to come. From what I’ve heard, HANA heavily relies/uses Intel specific instructions and hence hasn’t been certified for AMD Epyc. AMD Epyc certification may happen in the future.
@@srikanthramanan I run a data center with all AMD Epyc CPUs on VMware. We do a lot of hosting for customer DEV/Demo SAP systems and that includes HANA. A few years ago I ran the HANA PRD performance test that can be used to certify hardware that isn't on the HCL. Our Epyc Rome and Naples systems passed with flying colors. I think the entire Intel Specific Instructions is nothing more than marketing saying "Intel has given us a boat load of money to keep this Intel only."
@Zbigniew I would have loved to have it certified going back to Rome. AMD with the 8 channel DDR4 made a huge difference in RAM density compared to Intel. Now with ICL & SPR Intel has only gotten to 8 channel and FINALLY gotten rid of the L series CPUs to allow all their CPUs to access the full amount of RAM. However, once again Intel is behind the 8 ball in terms of density compared to AMD. With Genoa AMD is going to 12 channel RAM when Intel is still at 8 channel. When you are doing virtualization, RAM is much more important that physical cores when you are running dual socket 32c/64t CPUs. All my hosts have 1TB RAM and I wish I had another TB/host. CPU over provisioning by 25-30% or more is pretty easy when you have that many cores as the odds of not having available cores and a VM waiting for CPU is quite small. However, RAM over provisioning can have a MASSIVE performance impact at just 10% to the point that VMs crash.
It's heartbreaking to see Optane go away. Damn, Intel...I hope they license it out to other manufacturers.
The other way round. Intel is now sitting on some juicy patents with this and will sue anyone who attempts to bring something similar (and possibly better) to market.
I think Micron still have it.
@n n I don't think Intel did a good job of explaining what it is or putting it in a form that people wanted. It's definitely desirable but you think you already have it when you buy a normal SSD, you don't have what Optane provides.
@n n Yes, terrible marketing. I've often tried to improve computers using caching or small SSDs but the economic of this are poor and getting worse. First of all fit a decent amount of RAM that speeds up disk activity due to not using the disk as a substitute for RAM. Secondly have a large SSD for the OS or everything if you can afford that. Finally use the hard drive for bulk. Optane does fit in here but as the operating system drive rather than some kind of cache.
@n n In terms of what you'd want from solid state storage Optane has it, assuming it was bigger and cheaper. Nand Flash is a really messy compromise that only works because it's bigger and cheaper. Without all the go faster trickery added to it it's slow. Optane is naturally fast and does not wear out.
Optane: the most revolutionary technology Intel squandered since i960.
Yep. Dammit, Intel.
Everything intel does is a failure if its proprietary.
Intel is just a crazy circus of budgets and smart people working on projects that will never be funded enough to survive.
They also squandered Itanium
@@squelchedotter They didn't really squander it. There was nothing to squander. It was an experimental architecture for which the necessary clever compilers were impossible to write, and was more of a f***-up that took way longer to die than it should have.
1. company comes up with cool new technology.
2. company doesn't know how to sell it.
3. the technology dies.
4. thanks, patents 😠.
I kept hearing that optane was best suited for the CXL implementation so its upsetting to hear that it'll be stopped just before CXL will be used
We really wanted to get Optane memory. I wanted our databases to be on it. But it is simply too expensive for what it does. Instead, we just bought 1TB of RAM instead. The tradeoffs are better for that than Optane. We cached the whole database in RAM, more or less. Longer starting time, but I will take that.
It's pronounced Lee-high instead of Leh-he. I was at BYU in Provo and at STEM Fairs Micron would come and really push for interns or full time engineers to come and work at the plant. They had marketing material and everything, and the idea at the time was to speed up slow hard drives, which made sense at the time when ssds were still somewhat expensive
In my opinion the constant delays of Xeon SP killed optane. It wasn't too early it was too late. When it was initially planned to release there was no CXL and nand flash was still expensive and the write endurance was an issue.
Now the price premium cannot be justified.
Was part of the Optane problem the software stack, was the software just to slow. I did see that level1tech video about intel redoing the driver stack and got massive gains.
Optane, I always wanted to use you but never had the chance. RIP 2022.
I was genuinely excited for the 3DxPoint stuff years ago, imagine no need for mass storage via NVMe, SATA or SAS for Workstations and NV storage via memory slotted in DIMM.
there's always a need for storage. You can't load everything on the internet in local memory.
Sadly, looks like HBM2 is also heading to the same outcome. Apple didn't use HBM memory to achieve the same throughput using LPDDR5X
@@RunForPeace-hk1cu Yes, there is always a need for more storage. What I meant was for something like a local machine/workstation, a few hundred gigs to a few terabytes (based 2) having as fast as RAM non-volatile storage is a good thing. Having it lower/faster latency or similarly as low/fast latency as well is also good. Completely side stepping the need for another layer of cache (RAM in this case) can be beneficial for more speed and efficiency, especially when RAM needs continuous power to keep state compared to, well... non-volatile.
It sucks so much that Optane never made it to a price where a consumer version of the P5800X would have made sense.
For completeness I feel you need to do a deep dive into HPs 'The Machine' and its Memristor memory technology.
Its birth, gestation and then quietly being announced as dead on arrival as well, in not so many words. 😄
Ah, so that’s what it was called. I was trying to remember the name but all I could think of was “The Cube” or “The Solid” or something along those lines.
It was clear from the start it would fail!
As the whole idea was terrible and guided by a blind ideology.
That is, removing the distinction between the persisted state and the working state.
Every tech/product that tries this, will fail.
Only those that trust hard-and software to never produce any error, or otherwise unwanted result, believe it will work and try to make it!
Wendel from Level1Techs is certainly very sad since Intel announced this...
I got to #3 and my brain began to hurt, and it just kept going... Intel, what were you thinking?!
I'm digging the K6-2 CPU in your Cache/Latency diagram 😀
AMD is gone, you love TSMC now?
Intel had squandered Optane by making it only a glorified HDD cache for consumers and Intel exclusive.
Had they opened the tech to AMD and let it compete as an SSD, they would have probably been more successful.
Bit late to this, but we invested HEAVILY on optaine, and intels sudden cancellation of it has caused a headache of huge proportions. All the servers were gonna now HAVE to scrapp because we can no long rely on the supply chains.
Invested since 2016 - 18.72 Million
Scrap Value Today - Shreddies.
Still I can finally get rid of the last of our intel systems.
The processor cache, would be the new RAM, for intake from the SSD array.
You'd have terabytes of accessible memory from a Raid array of many PCI-E lanes. (All of it, nearly at once.)
The RAM would do write caching and when data change is pending.
I know you're going to say RAM can give you the data sooner.
If it has it, sure.
But Terabytes of all data being accessible, is a total game changer.
CPU cache will be a factor.
4:40 *Lehi ("Lee-hi"), Utah; not "Leti/Lehee". That once "IM Flash" fab is literally blocks from my house. Texas Instruments owns it now and makes analog semi's there.
This was a really good idea, and I'm surprised to see them discontinue it. It SHOULD have been a game changer
I would've loved a nice Optane setup. I have ideas for other ways of running it than the Memory and App Direct modes with the kernel just allowing two different mmap for RAM vs. Optane mapping. Allowing it to work like normal memory but with the application deciding what goes where
Abstraction? folks: Cache is like your nightstand where you put what you are currently reading, your personal library/bookcase are more like ram, the public library is your Hard Drive.
Pity they haven't tried going with an altered use-case - instead of developping CPUs which work with DIMM slots they could have prepared a more SoC comprehensive package with eg. 32-128+GB of "on package" high speed memory, eg. HBMe, for the compute intensive layer of data storage with the DIMMs delegaated to serving the purpose of NVDIMMs/Optane DCPDIMMs for slightly slower but larger mem pools and/or fast storage, whilst delegating all the PCIe lanes to extra controllers/accelerators/functionalities... a kind of a switch or shift in technological stacks that could have made success or at least that could have questioned the status quo. Heck, maybe somewhere down the line nVidia decides to buy the IP and they manage to extend their Grace+Hopper product stack with the proviso of the high speed RAM on package that's vastly superior to DIMMs, which then would serve the purpose of large mem pool providers for the compute intensive workloads DC (and possibly workstation) businesses are targeting.
I send my condolescence to pmem. Near-RAM latency and byte addressibility has some potential if only the price had not been this ridiculous. Its use cases are very narrow for this price point.
The pmem will be back some day when its killer application rises and that market becomes big enough to lure competition from big players.
Minor correction: The Micron fab is in Lehi (pronounced lee-high) Utah.
I hope Intel licence they patents for 3D X point technology, because for me this technology don't get enough development to take place, and where are places (specialized) where it would be much better than flash.
@n n do you even know what is different in this technology compare to flash (NAND)? It more similar to transition from vacuum tubes to transistors, than from DUV to EUV. Ofc maybe it would never perform as we hope, but without research you will never know. And a lot of performance we know left on table, if I remember correctly they don't even go to read full line, only one cell at once.
The idea of using Terabyte SSDs as RAM memory, is a genius idea.
People have and will again do it.
I would use RAM as a write cache, for a RAID NVME SSD primary access point.
Data processing would be orders of magnitude higher.
More cores, more PCI-E lanes.
Notice I reversed the RAM and NVME SSD roles.
Ever since I heard about Optane years ago when it was first introduced, I’ve always suspected that it wasn’t going to go anywhere and would eventually disappear. I think that the major problem was that your average person, and even your average PC enthusiast, just didn’t really understand it. Intel did a lousy job of marketing that technology. Year after year, it remained a mystery to most folks, and so there was never a grassroots buy-in for it.
I to this date have no idea what is it
Optane initially sounds amazing, but as it's slower than DRAM and data centres keep servers up, running, it seems too niche to gain the scale necessary in the market to be viable. You can memory map in data from disk files for example, write accelerators can use battery backed DRAM, SSDs can save state powered by capacitors.
So it really needed to deliver on the speed, density and cost hype; while also being ultra reliable. That sounds like a tall order for a new product facing mature technologies with much more R&D behind them.
Lookup Intel Terahertz, 1000GH CPU with 10,000 times less leakage, lower power and ran cooler with their "special sauce" they said. Yet 21 years later it's still not used?
A real myriad of issues that plagued such a great technology :(
Would've been incredible if 3DXPoint could've continued development. The IOPs, latency, and endurance were truly incredible. Tons of issues with the Micron agreement on the fab you mentioned and all sorts of development issues in general...
If it was cheaper than dram, then licensing it out to ssd manufactures to use optane chips instead of dram would have been neat.
It's pretty sad its coming to a close, it had a lot of potential. Would have loved a large ssd like that I could hammer away at and never kill.
optane dcpmm was a cool feature for server system for sap/4hana but very expensive. we will see what brings cxl 2.0
IDK, are high optane fuels really worth the cost? I heard somewhere you can add your own additives to your gas tank to make it high optane, the brand I was recommended was called liquid shwartz and when put in an electric camper van makes it go plad.
They killed it their self by not making it work on all pcs. Could of made billions off of that
this is the simple FACT, and very true 🤣🤣🤣
With loss of the manufacturing center and the development center I don't see what else could have happened.
The fab is located in Lehi, not Leti.
Only couple of year's i wanted an Optane module to speed up my HDDs. Because at this time, a big ssd was much to expensive for me.
Then came amd with it's software solution , where you could use every cheap small 128GB SSD to speed up the HDD by using it as cache. This I also didn't by ;-)
At the end (four years later) I bought my new PC with a real 500GB ssd, and since then (2018?), i use only SSD in PCs, and HDDs in the NAS :-)
I would use RAM as a write cache, for a RAID NVME SSD primary access point.
Data processing would be orders of magnitude higher.
More cores, more PCI-E lanes.
Notice I reversed the RAM and NVME SSD roles.
The processor cache, would be the new RAM, for intake from the SSD array.
You'd have terabytes of accessible memory from a Raid array of many PCI-E lanes. (All of it, nearly at once.)
The RAM would do write caching and when data change is pending.
Good video, what I really would like to know is:
How does this effects Aurora? Wasn't it supposed to sport Optane in conjunction with SPR+HBM2??
I don't remember Aurora having Optane as well. I know Optane was meant to be supported with SPR+HBM, but I don't think Aurora was having any
@@TechTechPotato Why did Intel push the 16gig cache drives so hard, despite desktop users wanting SSDs? These drivers work wonders in games such as Star Citizen..
Look on the bright side, the Pyramid of Optane will no longer be around to haunt your dreams.
Kinda suprised that cxl wasn't the breakout tech for 3d cross point.
Seems to me Intel was lying to investors about Optane's future even after Micron sold Lehi Utah fab to Texas Instruments. Instead of coming clean, they perpetuated this ambiguity for almost a year.
15:20 you think Intel would make this part of their B2B rent a server business model
There where plain and simply no good software ideas on the operating system level allowed to come through inside intel to make this kind of persistent memory to come through and become commonly used. Pricing was far too high, and performance turned out to be not really competitive. Huge clients avoided jet another attempt to get them on to a proprietary leash like the DDR-T stuff. However still the main reason why this technologie died was the fact that the technology turned out to not being able to compete with the advances in flash memory.
It's very disappointing that Intel is killing this because it was killer in homelab NASes. I was just finishing my undergrad when I hear they're discontinuing optane. Hope there's still enough on the market that I can buy some when I have a real job
They should have targeted just replacing NAND flash completly, which simplify a lot of things. But to do that you need big capacity and low cost. Another option would be to use it as a journal or write ahead log for file system or databases, accelerating writes, but then you could do the same with just RAM and battery backup.
Also now it is killed, it would be nicest if they open all related patents.
I was excited to see some enterprise database performance benefit, but the stuff that really helps the performance tends to be just fine with volatile memory.
Optane had a future... but not now. If it was being developed 10 years ealier then it would be able to compete but when they were so late into this game then cost wasn't adequate to performence gained. Especially when I didn't actually hear about this till it died.
Boy! didn't they rip off every customer with that extortionate pricing!
Just when I thought I knew everything! ;) Great job Ian.
My m.2 ssd speeds were higher than that optane memory 😂
Optane should have been a "Prosumer" type of product that boosted SSDs performance. For enterprise a drop in replacement for RAM at half the cost and no worry for power loss would have been an amazing value. You wouldn't have to keep every single server on a UPS.
Optane missed interconnect to cpu. DDR4/5 development took way too long (on memorycontroller/firmwarw side?) and killed it. Nvme is too slow because irq and os-software overheads. And now CXL could finally provide way to utilise pcie without overheads.
Sad
I don’t understand why they don’t license the technology out if they were to kill the tech.. this will revolutionize this entire industry, and they can make tons
Good idea, a niche product that was hobbled by an Intel lock in. Add the massive investments into DRAM and flash manufacturing and R&D that weren't available for Optane because of the proprietary lock in, it just got crunched from products from both sides. Even if it were not locked into the Intel ecosystem, the success of an Optane like product would not be guaranteed... it's just that the proprietary ness of it definitely guaranteed its death.
You are talking about the DIMM module version. The add-in SSD's did not have any such lock in.
@@Raivo_K the Optane SSDs were crippled by the i/o bottleneck, the promise was near DRAM latency and speed nanoseconds, not microseconds going through an OS stack designed for disk drives.
Memory mapping in data from persistent memory is interesting, but as it requires software changes and the main advantage is persistence at cost of speed, I guess most people will simply stick with RAM and precautions against power failure.
The cost advantage they promised in the initial hype simply was not delivered; that would be key to wide adoption but overcoming the economies of scale in DRAM & NAND was a tall order.
Would have liked it in my personal rig but the price was insane while persistent memory was not available. It was either get a 32GB optane SSD to "speedup" a HDD, or get a 250 GB SSD and still use it to speed up the HDD or just directly use it.
We would have liked it at work but again - was not available for laptops, hard to get for servers and then they cut it off. We have workloads that do only sporadically requires loading a lot of data - right now this is all on normal SSDs and you get significant slowdowns but adding more memory is just not worth it (direct costs as well as power) or for the bigger instalments just not possible (1.5TB limit).
Crow Pass is likely still coming
Looked all over the internet & couldn't find a clear answer to my question. Hoping you might shed some light.
I've decided to try to breathe some new life into my laptop that has only 8 GB soldered RAM by adding the Optane Memory Series (what you call cache drive) into a second M.2 slot for multitasking: Chrome/Adobe Acrobat/Office running all the time in parallel eating up all my memory.
I wanted to get the 32GB version of the Optane Memory but bumped into this on a non-Intel website & couldn't find a confirmation or disproof of it anywhere else: "You must use the M10 version of Optane Memory. The original version of Optane Memory will only be supported in a desktop environment".
Do you happen to know whether a non-M10 Optane Memory Series drive should work on a laptop? If not, I'll have to stick to the 16GB version as supplies are scarce at this point.
Thanks in advance!
P.s. I know Intel has stopped supporting this product for consumers & am ready to experiment with setting this thing up.
P.p.s. thanks for the video!
Any size M.2 drive that physically fits will work, whatever capacity of drive. They say that only the 16 GB is supported on the basis of their validation and guarantee, but the beauty of open standards is that whatever conforms to the standard should work effortlessly. But just to confirm here - the Optane cache drive won't add DRAM - it'll just be seen as another storage device. Intel called it 'optane memory', but it's just storage. Might as well add in 1TB M.2 drive.
imagine a intel prosumer gpu with expendable optane memory ..haha
With cheap Optane modules available and all new motherboards featuring a ton of NVME slots, I was looking forward to building a new 13th Gen system using it and really tweaking a 13600k system for productivity. Will 13th gen support Optane still ? or is it dead on the desktop now also ?
I just hope someone takes the technology and makes a good product out of it.
I think they just mis-marketed it, too expensive.
It could have been in every sever by now, if they were not so arrogant in their marketing departments.
Good engineers get shafted again by idiots in suits.
it was said by intel that it would be cheap & fast, but when the suits saw how fast (10ns) it was, they $$$$$$$, and started to make bad business decisions for the product.
Actually Its also the best for recording streams....
Quite decent for 4k raw and compression after that to clear the disk..
Doesnt bottleneck like an ssd
"here lies Intel Optane, a good technology killed with no valid reason"
What is the chance HK Hynix picks it up? Not zero.
Your key framing was a bit off on the graphics there. They faded in and out pretty immediately
Ian, can you tell me what brand U.2 to pcie adapter you are using for your Optane SSD's?
Why did optane always stay so expensive? Was it really that much more expensive to manufacture than a high end NAND SSD?
It is a sad day for tech. I hope I can acquire a 1.6 TB ssd optane at a good price.
Seems like Optane was in a really awkward spot: Existing software is optimized for slow SSDs/fast RAM, and cannot easily take advantage of an Optane intermediate layer without serious adaptions. But, no-one is going to do these optimizations, if Optane is not already a well-established technology...
Intel should have probably focused on those handful of niche-cases where the Optane benefit is largest, and then try to expand from there, instead of this mixed strategy they seem to have done here.
Add-in card SSD's did not require any special layers or optimization. These work well even on the newest Ryzen systems.
Cache models require primocache and DIMM's are not compatible anyway.
What's with Super nintendo shirt today?
If I remember correctly Optane/3D Xpoint wasn't developed by Intel rather it was something they acquired by buying its developer.
They could have used it as cache on their ssds or something (since it was so small in capacity). What a bummer to loose this awesome tech though.
They did and it was the worst of all 3 Optane product lines (cache, SSD and memory).
It is a cool technology that could possibly return in the future, but I think that’s improbable. It’s more likely that MRAM or another technology will come out that provides the features with a lower price and/or better performance.
Intel has been good at developing cutting edge technologies, but not good at bringing commodity products to mass markets. This is yet another example. Had they licensed this technology to other fabs and their CPU/Chipset competitors, it might have succeeded. They tried to keep it proprietary for competitive advantages…and lost.
Is the optane SSD still alive?
Does hynix own the rights?
Is it still being made or is it dead?
I haven't been able to get a straight answer.
first? Also news about intel killing things is a trend now ? :D
They said on the financials that they've cut 6 businesses in the past year/recently.
That used to be Raytheon's specialty.
was a technology that was errr NEW but like BEtamax it was obsoleet instantly
While I understand why it's happening (pmem was the wrong pivot) the fact that this kills low latency spectacular random performance storage makes me very sad. Kioxia's XL-Flash is good, but I don't see a future where this propagates down to consumer level products. Now I just hope there will be some sort of P5800X fire sale that happens since it appears to be the best storage device for the foreseeable future.
Optane? More like NOPtane!!! Optane? More like Floptane!! Optane? More like Nonane (that's a chemistry one)!!
Optane failed, I guess there was too much resistance in the market!
Intel might be mourning the loss of optane, or should I say poptane! As the market is now and truly popped, like a Canadian kangaroo jumping on glass globe of unity.
And now let us mourn with the national anthem of the UAE - Britney Spears - "i'm a slave 4 u"
Why would they just outright cancel it vs create a roadmap to slowly unwind it, so their Optane users / partners can plan around that. Seems very uniliteral, how many times can Intel burn their user base before it comes back and bite them. They must have stockpiles of Optane products, since it wasn't selling that well im sure.
I was always wondering what would happend if Intel put Optane on an ARC card and let it rip in some simulations or something. Alas, they may both end up relegated to the history books. Such a shame.
Optane, the most revolutionary product coming from Intel since the 386-SX...
I have the 665th like to this video...the next like will trigger the Devil's number.
Basically it sums up about all intel...
more durable than DRAM?
No but much more durable than even 1bit SLC NAND.
Just so you know, "Lehi" is pronounced "Lee High" not "Letty".
The reason I didn't buy an Optane memory years ago, even though I wanted to, was because I couldn't tell if it was compatible my AMD PC.
Optane memory (ie DIMM's) were never compatible with AMD. The standalone SSD's worked well tho. The small caching models worked but were problematic.
This is the problem marketing want gagzillion projects to market... the market only want one or two.. NVME in ram slots... win
I have been puzzling on this too, & am convinced the reason is entirely consistent w/ Intels wider seld destructive management policies.
This "tooth paste company" has not been interested in purveying new tech, but in Machiavellian marketing.
IE., not to purvey excellent Optane, but to use Optane exclusivity, to force buyers to expensively purchase Xeon.
This is one of many examples of how their sleazy methods have backfired on them.
We dont know it was expensive. We only know Intel's prices were high.
It seems most likely it was an excellent product which should have been a hit for both intel & IT, but Intel's Chief Jocks snatched defeat from the jaws of victory yet again.
Tbh, Intel's old tick-tok legacy era 2 gen platform change is no more price/performance competitive at this moment given the long term stable platform offerings by the AMD.
Did CXL kill the need for optane ? Didn’t intel also develop and sponsor CXL?
The cache drives were great as server boot drives but it’s not really their point
dont you think that'll lower optane prices and you can take advantage of it for a PI record ?
lol and there you go, you're asking for it !! ;)
Yisssssssss
3DxPoint never looked like a viable product to me. I remember Linus Tech Tips tried using it as memory, and it was much slower than actual ram. So it doesn't work as ram replacement. If it doesn't do that, then it's just really fast SSD. Most NVME SSD are fast enough for consumer and probably majority of commercial systems too, so 3DxPoint is left without a market.
I'd be using Optane for my mass storage if it were even only 1/4 the price it is now, but $4000 for 1.6TB? Too hard to swallow given that I'm not wealthy.
400GB model costs 1,5k. For an OS drive 400GB should be enough unless it's the only drive in your system.
Prices have gone up then, 800GB used to be $2k iirc - $2350 on Newegg for 800GB
@@TechTechPotato Not sure. These are EU prices and in Euros. Perhaps it's cheaper in Dollars.