Intel's new Optane memory technology could lead to 1000 times faster MacBook storage

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  • Reply 41 of 47
    bkkcanuckbkkcanuck Posts: 864member
    bkkcanuck said:
    What will happen is that computers will move towards having more DIMM slots for a combination and there will be changes in how the operating system decides to use what for what.
    I guess I don’t know of any technical reason this couldn’t happen, but can non-volatile memory be used across DIMMs? I remember reading once about the opposite: a specialized card being made into which RAM could be plugged such that the system would recognize it as a hard drive. This was to increase data transfer and access speeds, of course, but required that the card include a battery to keep the RAM powered should the computer be turned off.

    There’s probably a reason it didn’t catch on.  :p
    Not sure if they will have to have two banks for different speeds if they mix DDR memory and Optane DIMMS since they will have the same.... and there will of course have to be a new memory controller to handle it when it was introduced last year the results (numbers) that were mentioned were for the Optane based SSD / NVMe modules.... but the plans included releasing Optane DIMMS this year as well.  If you look at the Intel pyramid in the back they have a performance pyramid.  





    tallest skil
  • Reply 42 of 47
    bkkcanuckbkkcanuck Posts: 864member

    wizard69 said:
    bsimpsen said:
    1000x is misleading. Random accesses to bytes distributed far and wide across the memory array will be much faster, as there is no Flash page load latency. But sequential accesses, which are far more common, will go no faster than the processor's memory interface. The real-life speed improvement will be far less than 1000x, and probably far less than 10x (as already shown in the chart).

    We've got half a century of computer system design (both hardware and software) wrapped around the idea of large scale high speed sequential storage. The arrival of large scale high speed random storage doesn't change all of that. It'll take time for CPU designers to adapt cache strategies (or even eliminate cache), and for OS and app designers to adapt algorithms to take advantage of this new technology.

    Sad isn't it! Intel's chart is right there and as such it pretty much tells you that you won't be seeing a real world 1000x benefit.
    The chart is for the currently planned NVMe SSD modules over the NAND based NVMe SSDs.  The 1000x marketing blurb is for the potential of it when brought out in the DIMM format.  The problem is when you mix marketing which plays up the potential of the technology and technical which gives you stats of a product in that they have with test samples - it gets confusing for the techies like us.  

    This technology will give ME much more benefit than any of the other product releases... when they say Skylake is 20% more performance - in the real world it tends to be a couple of percent because when it is released the 20% more performance is hampered / averaged down by all the other components that are the same and the real world benefit is .... maybe a couple percent on release date.

  • Reply 43 of 47
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    Whatever happened to this? Another Intel effort that turned into nothing?
  • Reply 44 of 47
    nhtnht Posts: 4,522member
    Whatever happened to this? Another Intel effort that turned into nothing?
    "Today, Intel announced Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. This is a series of DDR4 memory sticks (with capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB) that use 3D XPoint instead of traditional DRAM cells. The result? The latency is a bit worse than real DDR 4, but the sticks are persistent. Although they use the standard DDR4 form factor, they'll only be supported on Intel's next-generation Xeon platform."

     https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-finally-announces-ddr4-memory-made-from-persistent-3d-xpoint/

    Yah, I want that in my next Mac Pro.
    edited June 2018
  • Reply 45 of 47
    mattinozmattinoz Posts: 2,299member
    nht said:
    Whatever happened to this? Another Intel effort that turned into nothing?
    "Today, Intel announced Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. This is a series of DDR4 memory sticks (with capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB) that use 3D XPoint instead of traditional DRAM cells. The result? The latency is a bit worse than real DDR 4, but the sticks are persistent. Although they use the standard DDR4 form factor, they'll only be supported on Intel's next-generation Xeon platform."

     https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-finally-announces-ddr4-memory-made-from-persistent-3d-xpoint/

    Yah, I want that in my next Mac Pro.
    Don't understand why they aren't targeting laptops (even iPads or phones) with this tech.
  • Reply 46 of 47
    tallest skiltallest skil Posts: 43,388member
    nht said:
    "Today, Intel announced Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. This is a series of DDR4 memory sticks (with capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB) that use 3D XPoint instead of traditional DRAM cells. The result? The latency is a bit worse than real DDR 4, but the sticks are persistent. Although they use the standard DDR4 form factor, they'll only be supported on Intel's next-generation Xeon platform."
    Yeah, this is the biggest takeaway: “...memory sticks that look like DIMMs and appear to the system as if they're DDR4 RAM but with much greater capacities…”

    512 gigs of RAM in the next Mac Pro. Just leapfrog everyone. For $30,000, of course.
    SpamSandwich
  • Reply 47 of 47
    nht said:
    "Today, Intel announced Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. This is a series of DDR4 memory sticks (with capacities of 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB) that use 3D XPoint instead of traditional DRAM cells. The result? The latency is a bit worse than real DDR 4, but the sticks are persistent. Although they use the standard DDR4 form factor, they'll only be supported on Intel's next-generation Xeon platform."
    Yeah, this is the biggest takeaway: “...memory sticks that look like DIMMs and appear to the system as if they're DDR4 RAM but with much greater capacities…”
    It looks like they are designed to be used in tandem with DRAM -- the developer preview system configuration has 16 GB DRAM with each channel, for a total of 192 GB DRAM and 1 TB Optane DC ("data center") persistent memory. While aimed at servers/databases, this seems like something macOS could maybe use. The 2019 target for the Mac Pro release fits the timeline for this. Cost might not be a huge problem -- Intel has consistently pitched Optane as being cost-effective, and of course it has to be to survive in the data center world.

    On the other hand, it would be a risk. While the idea of a layer of persistent memory beside/beneath DRAM makes sense, this may not be the only way to do that. Samsung, et al., isn't going to just lie down and let Intel monopolize this. Samsung's low-latency Z-NAND tech, for example. 
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