Epyc move: Supermicro plunges into Cascade Lake’s Optanical waters Supermicro is touting what's said to be the "first to market" Intel Cascade Lake AP Xeon server – and it's fitted with Optane DIMM modules to make in-memory apps, particularly the AI ones, run faster. Although the Silicon Valley kitmaker claims this month that it is first on the block with this grade of gear, it's not on …
1) When it happens, and is fully supported, Storage Class Memory will be a Big Deal. (Relatively huge, nonvolatile, fast memory with a direct, fast pipe to the CPU--no SATA interrupt bottleneck bus.) 2) Pricing, as well as performance, will have to be somewhere between Main Memory DIMM and SSD/Flash Memory. 3) "Full Support" means both the Processor and the OS need to be aware, and to be fully realized, the application stack needs to exploit. This will not happen in the next two years, but over time, it will offer 10x to 100x or even more, performance boost. To me, Storage Class Memory architecture (HW, OS, and Application) is the next revolution in computing. So far, IMHO, Optane is an evolution, and nothing more than a nonvolatile DIMM. Huh?
I agree optane isn't the magic bullet intel make it out to be. It expensively has a read iops/latency advantage over regular nand nvme of 2-3 times it seems, but not much else. It remains a fraction the speed of dram, an advantage non-volatility power savings wont overcome imo.
Regular nand still seems to have plenty of room to grow, with smaller nodes and pcie4, or using memory channels similarly to intels proposal.
this is what you get with SuperMicro: validation via Excel sheet, no testing. Some dude in Taiwan/China looks at the specs and decides it will work. Then they build and ship. You as customer then test in production. That's how you get "certified" servers that go up in smoke when plugged in, servers that can't even theoretically support certain components because someone made a mistake on their calculator, and never tested in a lab or in QA.
If you want to go white box, go Inspur. SuperMicro is a bunch of clowns.
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