Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3082658/data-storage/intel-lets-slip-roadmap-for-optane-ssds-with-1000x-performance.html

by Foggydog • 10 years ago

227 106 10 years ago

computerworld.com

imperialdrive• 10 years ago

I just love this stuff! Storage minded for 20 years... all other tech aside, storage is what gets me up until sunrise researching... if 2017 sees this kind of tech, I'll be smitten :-D

nashashmi2• 10 years ago

Won't there come a time when 1000x speed increase will still be slow?

The applications will mostly be on heavy data side like medical research and weather patterns, but it could also involve 3D photogrammetry taking in a trillion points.

brixon• 10 years ago

Yes, but storage speeds and battery life are the two biggest pain points for computers. Non-Multi-threading applications are starting to become a pain point.

astrodust• 10 years ago

Your average Instagram shot and filter involves more data processing power than NASA had in its entire supercomputer center in the 1960s.

What will the 2060 Instagram be?

nashashmi2• 10 years ago

If SSDs and RAM reach the same speeds, could RAM become obsolete? If so, architecture of computers will change drastically.

aeharding• 10 years ago

One of the slides mentioned it as a technology that can "serve as system memory and storage."

markokrajnc• 10 years ago

This may really change software. In the mean time combine RAM and Optane SSD and you will get RAM read spead and permanent RAM storage...

quantumhobbit• 10 years ago

They might reach the same throughput before getting similar latency, in which case RAM will stick around for a while despite SSds having the same or higher 'speeds'

loeg2• 10 years ago

If 3d Xpoint is cheaper, lower latency, and higher throughput than DRAM, yes, it will obsolete DRAM. Currently it is higher latency, and lower throughput. And it is cheaper on a per-GB basis, but with a much higher minimum GB (like, 128GB).

toomuchtodo• 10 years ago

DRAM doesn't wear though. Depending on your use case, you might not care if RAM is ephemeral. It just needs to be fast.

lorenzhs• 10 years ago

I don't think that it's intended to replace DRAM. It's going to be cheaper than DRAM (price-wise, I expect DRAM / 3DXpoint ≈ 3DXpoint / NAND), but significantly higher latency (the article says an order of magnitude, but those figures don't seem to include bus stuff etc, so it might be a bit more. Total latency will likely be in the range of a few hundred nanoseconds). That, and the limited durability (much higher than NAND, but still limited).

I think this is going to be amazing for "in-memory" data bases: it's cheaper, still very fast, has higher capacity and is persistent (the article doesn't even mention that). But it won't replace DRAM any time soon imho.

kijiki• 10 years ago

Even if it just cheaper and same order of magnitude latency, it'll likely take over. High end systems would still have DRAM as a large L4/LLC cache, while low end ones will omit it.

sorenjan• 10 years ago

Hewlett Packard Labs is working on something like that: http://www.labs.hpe.com/research/themachine/

1024core2• 10 years ago

.... for the last decade.

PeCaN2• 10 years ago

Lately I hear they spend their days playing Duke Nukem Forever on GNU/Hurd instead of working on memristors.

soganess• 10 years ago

I was HPE Discover and while HP Labs had a pretty big presence, "the machine"(what a name, huh?) was less present. In previous years, it was more center-stage. I am obviously overreaching, but that isn't a good sign.

batmansmk• 10 years ago

This will change deeply how we make desktop applications, as well as database management systems.

rudolf0• 10 years ago

I'm almost afraid to see what hardware will look like in 10 years.

maxerickson• 10 years ago

Don't even think about the software it will take to make it feel slow.

spitfire• 10 years ago

IBM AS/400 did this decades ago. It has a unified address space - you only see "space" not disk/ram split.

PeCaN2• 10 years ago

AS/400 still exists actually, under the name IBM i. I know a person who swears by them. It's a fascinating system. There are no files, only persistent objects living in a 128-bit address space. Downside: still uses EBCDIC….

snaky• 10 years ago

Actually single-level store concept was introduced in Atlas, used in MULTICS, AS/400. [1] Some modern and quite high-performance solutions are using this concept, e.g. LMDB [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-level_store [2] https://symas.com/getting-down-and-dirty-with-lmdb-qa-with-s...

chongli2• 10 years ago

Not so much for "traditional" desktop apps. This sort of performance isn't going to do anything for your spreadsheets or word docs. It might pave the way for some really interesting video games though!

CyberDildonics• 10 years ago

maybe not as much from a consumer standpoint, but the types of software architectures it will enable could be a big deal

mtgx• 10 years ago

The 1,000x speed is so ridiculously misleading. It's basically comparing it to the slowest microSD on Earth...from a few years ago. I doubt the speed will be more than a few times faster than the current fastest NVMe SSDs (if that), and it will probably be even more expensive per Gbps (and per GB, too) than SSDs are. But it could still find some success in niche markets initially, if it has much better endurance and other features that may be interesting to some enterprise customers.

xienze• 10 years ago

Yeah that's what I was thinking too... If it's so ridiculously fast, why's it on PCIe x4? Aren't we already getting close to saturating that many lanes with existing PCIe SSDs?

MustardTiger2• 10 years ago

No it is not, it is comparing latency, like it clearly shows in the chart.

erik2• 10 years ago

1,000x performance, but they are introducing it with a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface? That is suspicious. And then they are going to follow with a lower cost PCIe 3.0 x2 version? (That they still label as an Enthusiast / Workstation product?) I wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market so that you have to pay a lot for the "enterprise" product to get the full performance. Or, alternatively, if the real world performance is nowhere near the 1000x they keep talking about.

I wonder if they will position these as replacements for you SSD, or if they are going to pitch them as a caching layer they way they dabbled in hybrid SSD/HDD approaches.

wmf3• 10 years ago

I wonder if they are aggressively segmenting the market...

Intel always does this and Optane won't be any exception.

The "1,000x" claims are either at the chip level (e.g. NAND block erase vs. XPoint word write) or maybe some access pattern that is worst-case for flash. It's physically impossible to get 1,000x improvement on common access patterns.

MustardTiger2• 10 years ago

The "1,000x" claims are either at the chip level

It is latency.

olavgg• 10 years ago

Basically on a PCIe 3.0 x4 maximum performance is 4000GB/s, in practice this is 3200-3500MB/s. With 4k random write, you will get maximum 800.000 to 875.000 iops per second. Consumer-grade SSD's barely manage to write 500-1000 iops when sending the ATA_CMD_FLUSH command unless they are lying which is really bad.

Good read about consumer SSD performance: http://www.sebastien-han.fr/blog/2014/10/10/ceph-how-to-test...

erik2• 10 years ago

Right, elsewhere in these comments it was pointed out that they are talking about a 1,000x improvement in latency vs flash memory. If they are using PCIe x4 and x2, then it seems that their throughput isn't going to be much better than existing SSDs.

Improved 4k random read and write would of course sill be a big win.

daveguy• 10 years ago

nitpick: iops is I/O operations per second. iops per second is redundant -- would be like FLOPS per second.

Buge• 10 years ago

You made a 3 order of magnitude jump. Is that a typo?

bluecalm2• 10 years ago

So your run of the mill SSD these days is like 500MB/s. Dual channel RAM @ 1600Mhz with 64bit bus is: 2 * 8bytes * 1 600 000 000 = 25.6GB/sec

500MB 1000x faster would be 500GB/sec or about 20x faster than standard RAM.

That puts the claim in perspective :)

narrator• 10 years ago

500GB/Sec. the network is going to have to do some work to catch up to those speeds. We're going to see big iron replacing clusters until networking catches up.

1024core2• 10 years ago

You're talking throughput. They're talking latency.

bluecalm2• 10 years ago

Yeah, I had a blind spot here. It's just throughput is all that matters for things I am doing so it didn't occur to me "performance" claims might about latency. Thanks for pointing that out.

andrepd2• 10 years ago

1000x performance? 1000x relative to what? What's the actual figure we're looking at?

Guvante• 10 years ago

Seek time, there is a picture showing the seek times of different tech.

andrepd2• 10 years ago

Only orders of magnitude.

nneonneo5• 10 years ago

To be perfectly clear: the 1000x claim isn't about throughput, but latency. The graph in the article makes this clear: spinning drives have latencies on the order of 10ms, NAND flash about 10us, and DRAM about 1ns. The claim is that Optane will achieve latencies on the order of 10ns, or 1000x better than NAND.

The on-stage benchmark shows a write throughput of about 2GB/s, which is a much more modest improvement over the 500MB/s of a modern consumer SSD (and perfectly within reason for a PCI x2 interface).

Koromix2• 10 years ago

Consumer OS I/O software stacks are completely unable to deal with this. It was fine for spinning drive latency, it's okay(ish) for high-performance SSD but the open/read/write model just cannot work that fast. It's several orders of magnitude off.

Assuming we keep the file system model, I'm guessing some kind of direct memory mapping is in order? Anyone knows what's ahead of us on the software side, to take advantage of this kind of latency?

wmf3• 10 years ago

http://pmem.io/

cleech• 10 years ago

Memory addressable non-volatile storage instead of SSDs that process block storage read/write commands, and file-system improvements to allow direct mmap of file contents from NVM into your process address space without copying through RAM.

jacquesm3• 10 years ago

Files exist because persistent storage is slow, copying data from RAM to disk is slow and we'd like to have a way to refer by name to blobs of bytes, but in the end it is only there because it's a useful metaphor. If the metaphor gets in the way of our ability to use the storage medium you can either do a mapping (like the direct memory mapping you refer to), which in this case would almost be like a backwards compatibility layer, a more involved scheme where all RAM is backed by persistent storage and devices only keep a flag which objects are currently being worked on and which are stable (an 'open' file would simply be marked as currently in use by an application but there would be no explicit save, just an unlock), or a completely new system based on an image like architecture (see: smalltalk, some lisp implementations). There are some drawbacks to that model (such as harder collaborative development) but I see no reason that applications could not be packaged that way even if the development used a more traditional method.

It would be fairly trivial to layer a conventional filesystem on top of such a persistent object store to get the best of both worlds, which would - amongst others - give you instantaneous suspend and re-awaken and other goodies.

If true this will vastly change the way we use computers.

gjulianm• 10 years ago

I'm curious, why do you say that the open/read/write model can't work? I suppose that current software should be optimized to take advantage of better performance, but I don't see why it is obsolete.

benlwalker• 10 years ago

http://pmem.io - for byte addressable form factors

http://spdk.io - for block device form factors

rubber_duck• 10 years ago

What's wrong with plain old mmap ?

coldtea• 10 years ago

Consumer OS I/O software stacks are completely unable to deal with this. It was fine for spinning drive latency, it's okay(ish) for high-performance SSD but the open/read/write model just cannot work that fast. It's several orders of magnitude off.

Citation needed.

nneonneo5• 10 years ago

This is a great question. One way I imagine it:

Short term, the disk controller becomes a peripheral on the memory bus. On a 64-bit x86-64 system, the top 16 bits of the address are either 0000 or ffff for RAM. Make it so that the prefix 1000 (for example) maps to the disk, so accessing (physical) address 1000000013371000 accesses byte 13371000 on the disk.

Now processes can just ask the OS to perform a physical memory mapping to obtain a range of virtual addresses directly backed by disk pages, with page protections set based on their filesystem permissions. Such physical address mapping interfaces already exists in most OSes to support memory mapped I/O (for example, mapping /dev/mem in Linux).

This addressing scheme has another advantage: other devices on the system can use e.g. DMA to directly talk to the disk without any CPU intervention. For example, the GPU could load textures straight off of disk, just like John Carmack wants.

Medium term, we start rethinking the filesystem. If we make the address range for a given disk completely persistent, we can just put pointers to disk bytes on the disk itself. Processes will use the same virtual addresses as the physical addresses when talking to the disk. Suddenly "serialization" to disk is no longer required: data structures can be stored in native form directly on the disk. Imagine having a "dmalloc" function call hand you a chunk of persistent storage which you treat the same as any memory, but which can outlive the process. Similar concepts exist in some languages (like MUMPS), and now we bring the idea to all programming environments.

Long term, RAM ceases to be an independent entity, and merely becomes OS-managed cache for the big persistent storage (assuming it still has any latency/bandwidth advantages by this point). Now you can get rid of the notion of "shutting down" or "starting up" the system: everything is persistent. Without having to constantly refresh DRAM to keep the system alive, devices can "sleep/hibernate" more frequently and readily, saving significant power. Programming models become nearly unrecognizable as old models of memory management and process lifetimes give way to new models of persistent storage management and eternal services.

We're not far off from seeing a potential revolution in computing here.

imtringued3• 10 years ago

For now. If you build it they will come. Things like these take time but they won't happen if the hardware guys don't move first.

Qantourisc• 10 years ago

The main reason to keep it are: 1) network 2) what if we uncover a faster cpu/mem ? We would need to reintroduce file-systems. I'd say it's safe to deprecate it after about 30 years after it become obsolete. (So we are sure nothing will surpass it any time soon.)

jacquesm3• 10 years ago

It's a game changer either way, and it will be one more nail in the coffin of anything mechanical.

zer00eyz• 10 years ago

For consumer, and "online" hardware I fully agree, but were going to have tape for a long time to come.

As a medium, for offline, offsite it still reigns king. Density, reliably, and durability remain high, vs platter based drives or SSD.

I know of at least two companies that keep tape going for compliance reasons. At the end of each year, they do a pretty large archival snapshot, and send it off to storage. It will remain there till some lawyer asks for it, and will most likely end up copied by a third party for the sake of integrity.

For one of them, the archive tapes are becoming a concern, the media is fine, but finding hardware is going to become a problem.

Joeri• 10 years ago

SSD's haven't displaced drives for bulk data center storage because it's all about $/GB and although SSD's are getting cheaper, spinning disks got cheaper in the same way. Intel is not going to compete on price, but on performance. So rest assured that spinning disks will be with us for a while.

eloff2• 10 years ago

DRAM does not have 1ns latency! On a 4ghz skylake chip you can access the L1 cache at 1ns. DRAM is going to be more in the range of 60(local)-100(remote) nanoseconds. Optane will likely be > 300ns latency from what I've heard, if you access it directly through the CPU memory controller via loads and stores, which is still very impressive.

nneonneo5• 10 years ago

I'm quoting from the graph in the article. The numbers are also meant to be "on the order of", since the graph only provides that level of detail - so, for example, 1ns really means "1-9ns".

I believe that they are using fairly best-case latency numbers, under the assumption that the memory accesses are close to sequential. For random memory accesses, as you note, the latencies are higher. Unfortunately the article doesn't go into detail on what Optane's worst-case latencies are, nor what the latencies will be like in a real functional system (mostly because Intel has only early prototypes to show).

chongli2• 10 years ago

When we talk about 1ns latency for DRAM we aren't talking about access latency, we're talking about CAS latency[0]. This is how fast the DRAM actually works. It doesn't include the rest of the overhead between the time the data is sent over the bus and the time it's loaded into a register and ready for an instruction to operate on it.

CAS latency for DDR3-3300 is less than 1/3ns, according to the article below. If Intel's new Optane memory can achieve addressing on the order of 10ns, it will be very competitive with DRAM, since all of other overhead along the data path ought to be similar.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAS_latency

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

Ok, a couple of things. First, I found it really amazing at how convoluted Intel plotted their numbers on that latency graph so that it would "Up and to the right" which everyone "knows" is good.

The second thing is that Intel has been claiming multiple GB/second of throughput as well. They really do believe this will be a replacement for DRAM on some platforms. As in you read into your L3 case from this stuff and you flush to it when you write out a dirty cache lines. And while that will make the overall system slower, it gives it literally instant stop/start capability if the key parts of your architecture are static (can retain data at 0 clock). What that means is a laptop that can turn it self off between waiting for sectors to read in from the disk or packets to come off the network, or keys to be pressed by the user. Non-illuminated run times in days off of a battery source rather than hours.

Imagine a 1.2TB of this stuff on the motherboard substituting for DRAM. So you've got every application and all the data for your applications already "in memory" as far as the chip is concerned. App switching? Instant, app data availability? instant. Quite a different experience than what we have today.

visarga• 10 years ago

Quite a different experience than what we have today.

For example, I only have to wait at most one second for an app to load, if it's not already open and minimized. It's comparable to the time it takes me to click a button. And my computer is rebooted only once every few months, so it's always up.

This improvement will be more meaningful for random access database operations.

simula67• 10 years ago

Is this technology costly ?

EDIT: Does not seem to be.

“You could put the cost somewhere between NAND and DRAM. Cost per bit, it’s likely to be in between them somewhere. But actual cost will result from the products we bring to the marketplace.”

http://hothardware.com/news/intel-and-micron-jointly-drop-di...

sspiff• 10 years ago

What that means is a laptop that can turn it self off between waiting for sectors to read in from the disk or packets to come off the network, or keys to be pressed by the user.

Yeah, no. It might be able to turn of the CPU, but everything else would have to keep running. Graphics hardware does not deal well with frequent state changes. Network hardware would still need to run to keep its clock in sync with the signal.

So, you get to turn off a handful of components, which is where we already are today - CPUs spend most of their time in deep sleep states. USB devices and chipsets implement sleep states. Graphics hardware clocks down significantly.

todd82• 10 years ago

To put these latency numbers in perspective 1ns is about 11 inches at the speed of light.

umanwizard• 10 years ago

Or three cycles on a typical desktop CPU.

Unklejoe• 10 years ago

I wonder what the actual latency improvements will be. If it's connected through PCI express, there will be a lower limit which is dictated by the bus. While reducing the latency of the drive will still certainly matter, this latency introduced by the bus will serve to lessen the relative improvements with respect to SSDs.

PCI Express is packetized and it takes a little over 1 nanosecond per byte for the 3.0 version. I believe the minimum packet size is 20 bytes, but I'm not positive on that. It seems like the latency could never be less than 2 * (1 * 20) nanoseconds in the case of a random access, and this is before the latency of the drive itself is factored in. Surely there will be a few clock cycles required for the drive HW to decode the PCIe transaction and act upon it.

That being said, any latency improvement of the drive _will_ have a direct reduction in effective latency in the end, so it’s all good news to me. I’m just curious about the 1000x figure that’s being referenced everywhere.

baq2• 10 years ago

so if you solder this accelerator onto a motherboard and make it a few times larger than your RAM, you get a super-low-latency L5-ish cache (where RAM is L4-ish) and, potentially, an ability to instantenously suspend and keep suspended without consuming any power at all, assuming RAM is mostly in the Optane cache at all times. sounds nice.

acqq• 10 years ago

If it still suffers from the limited number of the write cycles, if it's even a few orders of magnitude more it still can't be used instead of RAM, but still just instead of the disk.

hellabites• 10 years ago

They claim that it has an unlimited number of write cycles.

conistonwater• 10 years ago

Is this the same thing as this talk? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXurTRtmfWc

wmf3• 10 years ago

Yes.

k_lander• 10 years ago

That was a great talk. Thanks.

snorrah• 10 years ago

Ah, interesting, it seemed as if it wasn't going to be competing with current ssd's in terms of capacity, but the last part of the article mentions 10x the capacity of nand and so over a terabyte on an M.2 drive. Assuming price might be quite high, it seems like it'll be a full upgrade over nand ssd's.

gumby2• 10 years ago

No discussion of power in the fluffy article; perhaps there was some in the youtube preso but it's impossible to search or skim that. This would definitely be a game changer if they can really ship it that quickly. It's funny that a SVP talked about notebooks rather than phones or servers, where this could possibly be more effective. That shows where Intel's head is, unfortunately.

I wonder how it compares to the memristor, which also has a sub 90 ns switching time and pretty low power. Optane blows that out of the water, if it's not vaporware.

imtringued3• 10 years ago

SSDs consume too much power for phones. That shows that intel doesn't believe in the $15 revenue per phone hype. Unless you are the manufacturer of the entire phone you won't see a worthwile amount of money coming your way.

Synaesthesia• 10 years ago

Modern phones have very fast ssd's. Eg the iPhone 6S and Galaxy S6 have desktop class storage. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-i...

kriro• 10 years ago

How do contracts with laptop producers usually work? Could they ship in consumer hardware by the end of the year if that's the stated availability or does it usually take longer? What are the chances that the Apple flagship (MBP) timing will be synched with this technology will be available (possibly as an option only, no idea if the pricepoint is prohibitive)?

lionleaf• 10 years ago

"Supporting filesystems in persistent memory" (2014)

https://lwn.net/Articles/610174/

ClassyPuff• 10 years ago

gjulianm 20 hours ago

I'm curious, why do you say that the open/read/write model can't work? I suppose that current software should be optimized to take advantage of better performance, that is what really is.

Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance

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