Intel reveals Optane SSDs: 375GB to start, at surprising speed Intel has finally revealed an Optane product and told us how fast it will go. The TL;DR version is that the “Optane SSD DC P4800X” will ship by year-end, starting with a 375GB product that has amazing computed random read IOPS numbers, and can work as memory or as storage. Intel says the SSD is built with 3D Xpoint media, …
Is Optane an 'SSD'? It is literally a solid state drive, but generally that's used to refer to NVRAM flash, where as Optane seems to use some different technology (mem-ristor?), and it also seems to be aimed at a different use (something that's faster than flash, but slower than RAM), so maybe we should come up with a new term?
That would be foolish.
Intel 800 ton gorilla in the industry. AMD is a flea in terms of Intel's dominance of the market.
If caught, Intel would be in a world of hurt and the risk outweighs the gain by several orders of magnitude.
Its not just the payout in damages but also the potential for Intel being named a monopoly. Even the hint of a threat of being called a monopoly scared IBM shit-less and forced them to back down during the 80's.
Microsoft will be working weekends, reworking their code so that it will still take at least 20s to open any Office file.
Office 2013: <click>... Okay, what are you doing? Yes, nice scrolling dots. Hello? What are you doing? Open the file! It's a 12KB Excel file. Open. The. F-in. File. Still scrolling dots? Why? It must be billions and billions of instructions by now... Uh, look! It's nearly open, almost.. Come on baby, you can do it. Come on, uh! YAY!!! Nice... Ah, there it is. "15.3", thank you. Close. ...Oh, what was the other number? Damn...
Where's Henry VIII when we need him?
"Microsoft will be working weekends, reworking their code so that it will still take at least 20s to open any Office file."
Why would MS want to change this? - The longer it takes to open a file, the longer the user's captive eyeballs will be subjected to ads (especially in Win10).
This is a win-win (for Microsoft). I'm sure that somewhere their business model suggests ad payment based on not only placement, but duration of ad as well.
I don't care what anybody says, I want it and I want it now!
This is wonderful, this will make me more attractive to women, I will be the envy of every man in the office, I'll be able to strut like John Travolta.
How do I get it? who I need to sleep with? what does it actually do? Will it be faster than my old 5300 series DIMMS?
Some people (normally pretty reliable), are saying some pretty bad things about it:
https://semiaccurate.com/2017/03/10/intel-mislead-press-xpoint-next-week/
Probably better to "wait and see" with this.
Not only is that an excellent article (as per usual for SemiAccurate), but that last paragraph but one was spared nothing in calling out by name certain journalists that they believe are influenced unduly by Intel. Certain journalists whose bylines appear in El Reg., no less! :)
The *drive* mode of the optane device will not be an issue with AMD's new chips. It will however be unlikely to support running in *memory pool* mode on AMD chips as the article notes that this requires a driver loaded between the (firmware) and the (OS) that only works on Xeons.
Still, if the latency is that low, I can think of a damned good use I could put it to in .... umm think we now have 85 data nodes, 30 some of which need really fast scratch pad temp file systems. (SAS is bitch that way)
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