Trying Out Intel Optane Memory On Linux

[speculatrix]

I'm disappointed, I thought Optane was supposed to be a reasonable fraction of the speed of RAM, with the non-volatility of an SSD... kind of a slow battery backed DRAM solution. At the moment it seems to be just a better version of an SSD for read, but poorer on write.

[schmidtbag]

The reason I'm not buying this "accelerator" thing is that everybody knows xpoint is actually supposed to replace SSDs and possibly even RAM. This current incarnation is a terrible stopgap solution. Get it if you need it, but it's not for me.

In that regard, I don't disagree with you. It is just the first iteration (so there is room for improvement) but on the other hand, Intel has the funding to make a much more polished release than this.

[bug77]

In that regard, I don't disagree with you. It is just the first iteration (so there is room for improvement) but on the other hand, Intel has the funding to make a much more polished release than this.

SSDs needed a first iteration too, but it wasn't as bad at this. Gotta love how I'm spoiled by technology to the point I get to pick and choose

[caligula]

For home users, I think other, cheaper solutions can easily beat Optane in perf/price ratios. Some thougths:

1) How much bandwidth do we need?
2) How many IOPS?
3) Do the SSDs wear out too fast?
4) Do we need even faster boot speed? How much of it is I/O bound?

Even 256 GB TLC SSDs will last for years in normal use. My guess is, soon 10yo SSDs (TRIM enabled) will still be usable if they implemented any wear leveling and had enough free space.
Samsung 960 EVO NVMe already provides pretty awesome I/O. With a heatsink up to 3,2 GB/s read speed. Without heatsink around 1,5 GB/s on avg.
UEFI bios with fast boot already improved boot time a lot -- my system cold boots in 11 seconds. 4-5 seconds of that is wasted before the disk reads kick in.
You can make boot process lighter.
You can use fast lz4 compression to increase perceived disk bandwidth.
You can organize files on disk to boot faster.

[liam]

The reason I'm not buying this "accelerator" thing is that everybody knows xpoint is actually supposed to replace SSDs and possibly even RAM. This current incarnation is a terrible stopgap solution. Get it if you need it, but it's not for me.

Everybody knows this?
TMK, we so don't have confirmation from Intel as to what exactly xpoint is (which memristor implementation). We know it has asymmetric reading and writing, is bit addressable, has a better than dram density, and each cell can only be written to a finite number of times.
There's a lot that we still don't know about this thing.

[polo]

i wonder if Kaby Lake Celeron/Pentium CPU works with Intel Optane under Linux. Intel datasheet say NO support buy its SW or HW limitation?

[marty1885]

i wonder if Kaby Lake Celeron/Pentium CPU works with Intel Optane under Linux. Intel datasheet say NO support buy its SW or HW limitation?

I believe it will work. Optane shows up as a NVMe block device under Linux. So in theory Optane will even work on Ryzen. However due to the lack of software support. Optane is basically a really fast/durable SSD under Linux. It won't work as a smart cache.

[mowglie]

nice discussion. i've a more basic challenge perhaps. i have a 16GB intel optane in my laptop. i want to use it with linux as a normal SSD, but it does not appear as a drive during installation process. pls help me configure the bios or whatever else i need to in order to achieve this. i have win 10 on the laptop now but i do not want or need win 10 at all.

the drive does appear in my bios as a raid 0 drive but i see no where i can change that setting. pls ask whatever details you need. thank you.