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Intel Offers More Insight On Its 3D Memory (itworld.com)
itwbennett writes: When Intel and Micron Technology first announced the 3D XPoint memory in July, they promised about 1,000 times the performance of NAND flash, 1,000 times the endurance of NAND flash, and about 10 times the density of DRAM. At OpenWorld last week, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich disclosed a little more information on the new memory, which Intel will sell under the Optane brand, and did a demo on a pair of matching servers running two Oracle benchmarks. One server had Intel's P3700 NAND PCI Express SSD, which is no slouch of a drive. It can perform up to 250,000 IOPS per second. The other was a prototype Optane SSD. The Optane SSD outperformed the P3700 by 4.4 times in IOPS with 6.4 times less latency.
1,000 times the performance, or 6 times the performance? Somebody needs to get the story right with the hyperbole.
Yeah, we *really* believe Intel's marketing statements; I mean, they've been 100% accurate in the past.
Look, just shut up and start shipping product. The IT community will come up with their own performance figures.
Increasing Memory Speeds 1000x will not lead to a straight 1000x increase in operations. There are undoubtedly other bottles necks in processing. What for instance is the theoretical max throughput of the memory interface used (is it a modified SSD interface)? What CPU overhead is involved? Don't expect your computer to perform 1000x better across the board just because one component is 1000x faster.
Letter To Iran
"6.4 times less latency" means that if the latency of the baseline thing you are comparing against is X, then the latency of the new thing has a latency of 6.4 times X less than X, which is X minus 6.4 times X, which is negative 5.4 X.
The latency we're discussing is a measurement of time (and up until Intel's amazing breakthrough it was always positive).
This means that Intel has discovered tachyons, invented a time machine, and violated causality in general. Either that, or "journalists" and marketers don't know what they're doing.
Would expect my circa 2017 laptop purchase to have 1 TB of XPoint memory, dynamically used as RAM and 'SSD' (32G and 'nearly' 1TB), deliver a 5 to 10x increase in general performance, and cost relatively the same... Reasonably stupid idea?
Fix stupidity (and laziness) first.
Yeah, that's a realistic and practical precondition for any project.
I mentioned this in a story a few days ago, but this brings it back to the forefront. The fastest SSDs have sequential write speeds about an order of magnitude slower than typical DDR3/DDR4 SDRAM. Increasing SSD speeds to be on par with DDR means you may actually need far less RAM than you did in the past because swap operations have very little cost. If endurance ticks up three orders of magnitude (as claimed), you might start considering dropping DRAM entirely for low end computers, perhaps with an increase in CPU cache sizes to reduce misses.
Now that seems ridiculous, but so did having video processing on the CPU a decade ago. And yet the Iris and Iris Pro that Intel is putting on the Skylake chips are on par with lower end dedicated video cards that can run even current AAA games at reasonable resolutions and framerates.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
How does performance compare to the fastest RAM drive? And what would be the estimated cost per IOPS of each? (RAM vs SSD vs Optane)
Maybe CPU, OS and compiler tools should offer feedback to the programmer on how the program is affecting various levels of cache first, then the programmer will improve. Start with the laziness of the hardware/software vendors.
They do. It is called Performance counters. Check V-Tune and PAPI.
Using XPoint as a successor to mass storage in my mind is short term thinking. Maybe its a quick way to sell the technology in the near term, but certainly not the best use case.
We should get away from mass storage altogether and use this as replacement for RAM. It will take a rethinking of operating system structure, but promises to provide instant on computers with all programs and data always loaded and ready for immediate access. Database systems would immediately be orders of magnitude faster because all data is always ready for access.
I for one will not miss virtual memory...
Greed is the root of all evil.
This comparison says nothing at all about 3DXP except that it is much faster than NAND. With NAND, it is the NAND memory itself that limits the speed. With 3DXP memory, it is the PCIe connection hardware that is the slowest component and therefore rate limiting for the entire retrieval speed.
When Intel/Micron says that the 3DXP is 1000 times faster than NAND, they mean that it has only 1/1000th of the latency. You will never see that speed in an SSD drive. The speed of 3DXP will only be realized as a DIMM module in a custom designed server with all the software modifications optimized for it. 3DXP is revolutionary for in-memory applications running in server farms. And once Intel includes 3DXP on the die with the processor, nothing currently envisioned will be able to compete with it.
BTW, although Intel will have a great advantage using this technology, from what I can tell it was actually Micron that invented (or developed from an early purchased prototype) this memory. I'm still waiting for Micron to start telling us what materials were used and how this memory actually works. That will tell us what its ultimate limits are.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Yes, it is only six times faster- it has probably saturated the PCIe interface. Intel has already said as such that this would be an issue and that a new interface will be needed to accommodate the rams capabilities.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Am I the only one who thinks this technology is shockingly under-hyped? It eliminates a 50-year old performance anchor, neutralizes the biggest challenge in Computer Science, and makes a supercomputer out of an SoC.
It came out of nowhere, but I believe Intel's claims. They wouldn't restart memory manufacturing in their own facilities if the tech wasn't ready for prime time.
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This reminded me of the fiasco technology Bubble Memory.
You remind me of somebody who can't read numbers.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
One I've been seeing more lately that you can add to that list is "LED light."