Happy Motherboards day: Here's some (Optane) memory Hot on the heels of the Optane DC P4800X data centre SSD announcement, Intel makes a move on PC motherboard memory. Optane uses co-developed Intel and Micron 3D XPoint memory, said to be not as fast as DRAM, but faster than NAND, while having NAND's non-volatility and pricing between the two. The M.2-connected Optane 2280 …
"Files needed for important tasks are immediately recognised and accelerated".
I suppose that the optane can recognise the stars on bars on the user's uniform and will generally accelarate a general's files generously, give a major's files a major boost, but won't blow off a captain's cap.
Not only that, they based their speed comparison between a PC with a high end Z270 motherboard and top range i7 CPU with a 1 TB hard drive and the same with the Optane m.2 card. Who is going to buy such a high end PC without an SSD? No one, that's who! I guess it doesn't show any useful speed up when measured against a PC configured in a sane manner.
Does this appear to the OS just like a flash drive would appear? Then I could use it for ZFS intent log or bcache or whatever, which is good. At 32GB it's not really big enough to be useful for anything else.
However, Intel's specs say this is only supported on Kaby Lake processors and chipsets - why is that? Surely NVMe is NVMe? Is this actually a proprietary interface?
The potential benefits over SSD might be:
- longer durability
- not being tied to a block-erase cycle for writes
The latter could make a big difference. I have seen SSDs where the write throughput has dropped from 200MB/sec to 10MB/sec after a few minutes of sequential writes, because of thermal throttling from all of those erase cycles.
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