back to article Wikibon drops bomb, says Intel's Optane could be a flop...tane

Intel's Optane 3D XPoint drives could be doomed to fail in the mass market because their performance and endurance advantages over 3D NAND SSDs are "nominal". So claims Wikibon CTO David Floyer in a report that looks at Optane's performance and endurance advantages over 3D Flash by comparing Intel's 32GB Optane Series PCIe M.2 …

  1. Mark 110

    I would have thought its far too early days to make calls like that. XPoint will come down in price through volume and nailing the manufacturing process down tighter. And speeds will improve as they iterate on the designs.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      but it needs to be compelling

      I agree it's still early, but they've really screwed this up so far. Over promised and under delivered. The DRAM and NAND guys are not sitting still either .....

    2. Mikel

      A terabyte of XPoint will be as big as a toaster and almost as hot. They've got about six generations of package shrinking to catch up on density with flash at the package level. Also that much will cost as much as a small house.

      It's just not worth it yet for mainstream datacenter use. Maybe in a few years it will be worth checking on their progress. If it hasn't been cancelled yet.

  2. Gerhard Mack

    I wouldn't mind

    Right now SSD is the premium options on workstations and servers with the 3x price markup to match on the server side. If Optane took that spot instead, and dropping SSD into the standard spot on everyone's price list,I would be much happier.

  3. Jonathan 27

    I think Optane is likely to become one of those superior proprietary technologies killed by a cheaper, more open standard that's nearly as good.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Nearly as good"

      It's apples and oranges.

      Xpoint is not an SSD, it's not RAM. It's inbetween. If the PC/system does not need it, it does not need it.

      The article also makes mistakes, while a RAM disk/cache is faster it is often more expensive (even with Xpoint high priced entry to the market).

      If Xpoint does not drop in price and does not increase in speed/size then yep, it will fail. But if it keeps up, it will have a few very specific use cases (where instant on/power failure redundancy is needed and an SSD does not have the write cycles/speed).

      1. yet_another_wumpus

        Re: "Nearly as good"

        @TechnicalBen: "It's apples and oranges.

        Xpoint is not an SSD, it's not RAM. It's inbetween. If the PC/system does not need it, it does not need it."

        That's the catch. 3DNAND is killing it in storage, and the use of psuedoSLC is pretty much killing the "inbetween needs" as well. It would make all kinds of sense if 3dNAND was always "slow" (relative to xpoint).

        @bldrco: "While 3DXP is more expensive than 3D NAND, it's an order of magnitude cheaper than the DRAM that it's actually aimed at replacing."

        Really? Microcenter spammed me yesterday with a sale on xpoint: $80/32GB. Pcpartpicker show 32G for $209. So less than a factor of 3 (newegg had a similar price, amazon had 0 hits on "optane"). The big kicker is that they have to get the endurance up. Endurance is believed to be a few times higher than SLC, not nearly enough to replace DRAM.

        If they get that endurance up, I suspect they can indeed replace DRAM. I also think that is what is holding up the DDR4-slot stuff. That and not providing *any* information to provide compatibility.

  4. bldrco

    Wrong comparison

    While 3DXP is more expensive than 3D NAND, it's an order of magnitude cheaper than the DRAM that it's actually aimed at replacing.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wrong comparison

      Yep. Just as early SSDs were there for OS only, as the cost for the entire system being 500gb flash was prohibitive, we get the same with Xpoint. Would would have dreamed of 1 or 2 tb flash drives when they first released? Now would you want to go back to booting off a platter?

      But in 5 years time? A 500gb Xpoint PC, with no ram, just a "SSD", or would it be a "XSSD"? Would boot instantly, power off instantly, resume instantly... it's just seeing where they price it, between the cost of flash + DRAM, or greater than Flash + DRAM to milk the profit. I'd assume they will milk the profit, and that will kill uptake. But if they balance production and demand, it will be ok for now.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Wrong comparison

        I don't share the fetish for always on instant resume. Give me a hard state-clearing power cycle if the only cost is a 20 second SSD boot. Software is getting less reliable, not more.

        What do you call a boot loop on a machine that doesn't have to boot?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Facepalm

          Re: Wrong comparison

          The option for a cold boot/power cycle/memory clear has nothing to do with the ability to power on from that memory. Hibernation/suspension/sleep has been available for spinning dirt for years, so not adding in Xpoint (or similar tech) is not a problem.

        2. bldrco

          Re: Wrong comparison

          Regarding "instant on", imagine the power savings for a smart phone if it had such a feature. I suspect we're a ways out from seeing this trickle into such client devices, though.

          1. ilmari

            Re: Wrong comparison

            They already do, pretty much. Their sleep states would give around 2-4 weeks battery life, It's just that they power up constantly to check farcebook, twitters, instagrams, snapchats, whatsapps, Skype, telegram, google+, gmail, oemaccount, google play, weather widgets, location, etc...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Wrong comparison

      It's trying to grow from the middle, with DRAM-like and SSD-like offerings. This article refers to Optane - the SSD-like solution

  5. wjchan

    Current offering is not compelling...

    After testing the Intel P4800X 375GB Optane SSD drive, I believe they will have a hard time selling that. Real-world performance improvement is marginal, and they haver to cherry-pick benchmarks to make their case. That's probably why they have held back the availability of that drive. They need to bump the 7-channel controller to 12 or 14. Better yet, the DIMM version will eliminate a bunch of bottlenecks and truly show off the underlying performance advantage of the memory technology.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Thumb Up

      Re: Current offering is not compelling...

      IMO the only place this tech makes sense is as a total replacement for SSD (but we have to wait for the cost to drop for that, as we did for platters vs SSD), or as a total replacement for DRAM.

      So it's a waiting game. Remember, even the first petrol/diesel cars were slower than horses! :D

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    Just seen a good idea else where...

    Someone posted about the future of PCs being the RAM as HBM on the CPU, super quick, but smaller than now (8gb and 16gb vs the 24, 32 and 64 options) but with Xpoint in the DRAM slots (or as an option to). That could work, giving the current ram a boost in speed being so closely integrated into the CPU pipeline, and giving a nice power off, speed, size and price friendly "cache" of storage for an SSD or spinning rust.

  7. tostaypuft

    Might want to consider 3D Xpoint performance when it is external to the server, unconstrained by a controller.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thunderbolt?

    This screams Thunderbolt 2. Sure, it might be superior on paper, but when the sole source is Intel, you need an Intel controller, Intel CPU, Intel driver, at 4x the price... what's the draw? The performance differential surely isn't enough for anything but niche cases.

    Don't worry guys, USB is going to be dead any day now...

  9. talk_is_cheap

    We are still waiting for the 'real' product

    Currently, all Intel seems to have to show is a 32GByte stick that is aimed at caching. Something of a dead end product considering the performance caches of many U.2. sticks are now larger.

    The original pitch for this tech was 256GByte memory modules for installation into large fat servers where each Intel CPU could address 8+ memory sticks. The possible resulting I/O was meant to interest the big data and VM markets.

    Today I wonder how many designers are more focussed on what they can do with 2 AMD top end processors and 128 PCI 3 lanes - that's a lot of 2TB U.2. sticks without paying premium rates to Intel for a lot less storage capacity.

    1. bldrco

      Re: We are still waiting for the 'real' product

      I think the P4800X is the 3DXP Intel currently has available for servers: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/data-center-ssds/optane-dc-p4800x-series.html?wapkw=p4800x

      The DIMM version doesn't appear to be available, though.

  10. tostaypuft

    MS posted this today https blogs.technet.microsoft.com/filecab/2017/07/11/storage-spaces-direct-on-intel-xeon-processor-scalable-family-codename-purley/ Pretty impressive results

  11. skoenigsberg

    I work for Infinio - a leading provider of high performance I/O through a RAM-centric server-side cache.

    We work with customers every day who are looking for high performance, (performance they just can't get any other way) and a few things come up repeatedly:

    1. It's all about workload: The customers who care most about microsecond latency (i.e. going 20X faster than all-flash storage) rely on data processing jobs whose value to the business increases as their time to completion decreases: by hours, minutes, and seconds. Validating or dismissing a technology outside the context of workload is largely irrelevant.

    2. For the times when a DRAM-only cache can't deliver the necessary performance (because of working set size), there's a huge benefit to having Optane over 3D NAND as the tier after DRAM.

    3. It's not always about relative cost. For customers whose business results can be impacted by these technologies, absolute cost is a far more relevant metric. When you look at the impact of data reduction technologies (which are, admittedly, relevant across all media types), the difference in cost from an absolute perspective is often dwarfed by the overall ROI from the business results.

    You can see our more complete POV blog post here: http://bit.ly/2u2yLcO

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