Intel's XPoint emperor has no clothes, only soiled diapers

Is the author just trolling?

I have serious problems with this article, which honestly just comes across as a petulant, whining hatchet job against Intel and X-Point. What's the matter, Chris Mellor, did someone from Intel p*ss in your cornflakes? Or is it just that they haven't given you an Optane drive to review yet?

This is one of the nastiest, most bitter articles I've seen on the Register. I try to always assume the best of people, but in this case I do wonder if there's an agenda behind it.

Your main complaint seems to be "although I haven't personally tested it yet, I don't think version 1.0 of a radically-different new product will have the performance that the underlying technology is capable of". So? That's news?

Look, there are mature, intelligent ways to point that out. Phrases like, oh I don't know, "Don't get too excited about X-Point yet, because *we believe* the initial drives will not have the performance Intel claims" would be a perfectly reasonable way to express your opinion. And your readers could argue for or against that viewpoint, like grown-ups.

Unpleasant references to "soiled diapers" and "shiny brown and creamy BS" just lower the tone and make you sound like a 12-year-old obsessed with bodily functions.

I've read your past articles. You can do better. It ill behoves you to write stuff like this.

SSD?

I started to get worried when I read the Tom's Hardware article about the presentation - which mentioned that the Optane memory was in an SSD being tested over Thunderbolt 3. I thought, "Why do a presentation in such a constrained setup. Surely a proper motherboard-based test would show off its capabilities better?" Then the penny dropped that they might be trying to hide something.

We'll have to wait for real product to know for sure, but my hopes for this new memory has been significantly lowered.

Not convinced by the article, Not convinced by intel either. 2nd Gen X-Point in a DIMM slot format would be around x1000 faster than current storage.

Does the author not realise that X-Point on all current storage busses don't have the bandwidth or low enough latency for it to perform to it's promise? Attach it directly to the memory bus and things could be golden.

That's marketing BS for you. Intel engineers no doubt hate the Marketers, they're probably using numbers for a product still under NDA.

Dude. You apparently have little experience, or none, with actually using SSDs or storage devices. 78,000 IOPS at A QUEUE DEPTH OF ONE is insane. If it scales, even horribly, under heavy load it is going to be absolutely amazing. You do understand that they spec storage devices at QD256, right? this is QD1. Faster than a SATA SSD under (literally) the lightest possible load that you can assign to the device.

The measurements of IOPS and latency are beholden to the controller. For instance, two SSDs with the same NAND can feature wildly different performance numbers if they have different SSD controllers. The controller is the limiting factor with a storage device, not the media, in ALL flash and memory-based storage products.

3D XPoint can program and erase each bit separately, which is not possible with a NAND based SSD. This also which means there is much more computational overhead (exponential) associated with the process. The fact that they are on the first generation of controllers designed for 3D XPoint means that the controller is even more limiting in this case.

A very bright storage engineer opined that if we took today's controllers and slapped them on yesterday's flash we would be astounded with the performance from older flash lithographies because they are faster and more endurant. The media technology, however, is moving so much faster than the controller technology.

The point of this ranting? The performance comparisons of an end device are pointless, they are not an indication of the performance of the underlying media.

one potential over statement generates complete nonsense

Chris,

Your commentary and analysis are a bit mind boggling. If Intel failed to deliver 1000X but ended up at 10X or greater on latency and IOPS I would argue that I'd take it every day of the week with a big smile on my face.

In modern systems with CPUs galore and 100Gb NICS around the corner, the storage latency and throughput are still huge bottlenecks that cause developers to waste time trying to avoid and/or skip at the expense of fault tolerance. A 10X reduction in latency on storage via NVMe is hugely welcome and will allow great programmers to push the envelope of what systems can accomplish.

I don't think you should be bashing the numbers but instead you should be complaining about delivery dates which seemed to be pushed back and never definitive. I, like many fellow developers, wanted this stuff the day it was announced and waiting over a year to get something is worth complaining about. >= 10X on NVMe is surely not something to complain about regardless if Intel said 1000X. Lastly, I would bet the numbers of XPoint DIMMs will far exceed the NVMe numbers.

Oh, and...

...I seem to remember that when Intel/Micron first announced X-Point, they said 'up to 1000x' faster? Which would likely mean 1000x faster than the slowest flash they could find, not 1000x faster than the fastest.

In Other News ...

Marketing suits have been known occasionally to exaggerate their products capabilities while playing down the competition ...

If you don't like it : Don't buy one, but for heavens sake STOP BITCHING !!!

This is the nastiest article I've seen in the Reg to-date.

Please take a pill, calm down, and while you are it, go wash your potty-mouth out with this bar of lye soap....

Good grief.

Multipliers are not additive

Piling on a bit, the difference between 1000-fold and 10-fold is 100-fold not 990-fold.

Marketing! Scourge of the seven seas!

Meh, can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. A lot like insurance companies.

overstatement would be 100x not 990x

If someone claims 1000x but only delivers 10x , then the overstatement is 100x, not 990x.

1000x Claim is for the DIMMs, not the SSDs

I was as at an Intel event a couple of weeks back. The 1000x faster claim refers to plugging 2nd Gen XPoint into a DIMM socket.

Dell buying EMC the best thing to happen to Chris Mellor

I've watched so many industry punduits going absolute gaga over this, ever since it was annouced, somewhat similar to Racetrack Memory and all it has done is raised more questions than answers, as with all annoucements of this type we've seen nothing apart from PowerPoints and that's when you know how desperate they have become.

Great work on exposing this phoney technology and keep up the good work ;-)

Roj is spot-on

I had a long winded reply but realized, why do all the digging. What Intel did was a bit disingenious, if you go back to the link Chris mentions they are comparing XPoint to flash. No doubt comparing XPoint dimms to "flash" SSD. it should have been comparing 250 ns latency to 80 microsecond latency, which is a 300x or so factor speed-up. But if you look hither and yon, you see SSDs that deliver read streams at 250 microsecond , there is your 1000x speed-up. Marketing (in my opinion) should have spoke about a 300x speed-up and explicitly mentioned they are comparing XPoint DIMMs to SSD flash.

Dig a little deeper

Disclaimer: I am CTO at a storage vendor, but have no direct interest in Intel.

The 1000x improvement over flash performance may be valid for raw latency. Read latency of raw flash is about 50us. That of raw XPoint might be about 0.1us. That is a 500x improvement---close enough for Marketing purposes. The reported latency of 7us is likely due to PCI overhead and the current controller and might be avoidable in DIMM form factor.

Re IOPS: note that the reported IOPS of 78,500 is for queue depth of 1 (i.e., with only one IO pending at a time). That is quite good. In general the IOPS reported for flash SSDs (often over 100,000 IOPS) is at high queue depth. Robin Harris gets it in his blog: http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-intels-3d-xpoint-will-change-servers-and-storage/ .

It is plausible that XPoint has the most advantage over flash for low queue depth applications and in DIMM form factor, and that that advantage dimishes at high queue depth.