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Intel Launches Mainstream Optane SSD 800P Series Based On 3D Xpoint Memory (hothardware.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the shiny-and-new dept.

MojoKid writes: Intel just launched a new family of consumer-targeted Optane solid state drives today, dubbed the Intel Optane SSD 800P. Unlike Intel Optane Memory sticks, which accelerate hybrid storage configurations with hard drives through intelligent data caching, or Intel's flagship Optane SSD 900P that's aimed squarely at hardcore enthusiasts with big budgets, these M.2 form factor Intel Optane 800P SSDs target the meat of the mobile and desktop markets, with higher capacities than Optane Memory but more affordable pricing than the 900P. In the benchmarks, the Optane SSD 800P series drives offered a mixed-bag of performance, with sequential transfers that top out at about 1.4GB/s, but with small file transfers, 4K random and mixed workloads, latency, and overall QoS looking strong. Intel will initially be offering two drives in the Optane SSD 800P series, with M.2 80mm 58GB and 118GB models. Suggested pricing for the drives is $129 for the 58GB capacity and $199 for the 118GB drive.

36 comments

  1. 3D silicon? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Do you want Skynet? Because that's how you get Skynet.

  2. Trash by sexconker · · Score: 0

    In every spec that matters, these are far worse than Samsung's 950 and 960 offerings.

    Maybe next time, Intel!

    1. Re:Trash by DeHackEd · · Score: 1

      "What matters" varies from person to person. These things have impressive endurance for their sizes and consistent low latency. There are uses for that.

      I don't need them, but I'm sure someone else does. Let them buy it and go grab a 950 for yourself.

    2. Re: Trash by guruevi · · Score: 4, Informative

      Careful there, not sure about these particular ones but Intel's current crop emaciates the Samsung even though on paper and synthetical benchmarks (IOPS and transfer rate) the Samsung does better.

      Testing it myself, the Samsung does good until you transfer ~2-3GB and then it drops like a brick to the lower 1000s of IOPS instead of the 100,000 or more it gave you.

      The problem there is that Samsung gives you a good RAM cache (backed up with huge capacitors on their DataCenter models) but once you request synced rates or exceed that cache, the controller lags behind. In the mean time, the Intel continues chugging along at 70-90k IOPS.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    3. Re: Trash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well I think that.....wait..."emaciates"???

      You mean "decimate"?

      I LOLLED

    4. Re:Trash by EETech1 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Relative latencies:
      SRAM 1X
      DRAM 10X
      Optane 100X
      NAND 100,000X
      Rust 10,000,000X

      https://hothardware.com/review...

      The same gains as going from HDD to SDD (1000X) are realized again going from SDD to Optane.

      Probably one of those things, you don't know why you'd even need it, until you have it, then you won't want to live without it.
      Or you're not demanding enough to even notice either way.

    5. Re: Trash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Emasculates.

    6. Re:Trash by Kjella · · Score: 1

      Probably one of those things, you don't know why you'd even need it, until you have it, then you won't want to live without it. Or you're not demanding enough to even notice either way.

      Or it's just not convenient to split the bits that could use Optane. I had the same issue with SSD/HDD, apart from bulk media (photos, audio, video) the primary space consumer is games. And a lot of that is cut scenes and textures and music loops and voice acting etc. that don't benefit a lot, while the main executable, scripts, maps, UI elements etc. is 1-5% of the game. But as long as Steam doesn't give me an easy way to say this 1GB go on SSD, the remaining 19GB go on HDD it's not worth the hassle, let's just wait until the price drops so I can put all 20GB on SSD. And I think Optane will be the same, it could be useful for a few things but most of it would be wasted.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    7. Re:Trash by EETech1 · · Score: 1

      I would be happy with 64-96 gigs of Optane ram, and no SSD
      Probably be faster than my 80 gig X25 8 gig setup now.

    8. Re: Trash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Flatulates

    9. Re: Trash by sa666_666 · · Score: 1

      You don't mean 'decimate' either, as that simply reduces by 10%. I think he meant 'annihilate'.

    10. Re:Trash by sexconker · · Score: 1

      These things CLAIM to have impressive endurance. That remains to be seen.

      During Xpoint's development, just about every promised spec, including endurance, was decreased by several orders of magnitude.
      When the first generation of Xpoint devices launched, they included a huge amount of extra hardware for over provisioning. If Xpoint doesn't need it, why include it? And why so much of it (more than an SSD needs).

      Further, the only endurance spec that matters is the one on the box. Samsung's products carry a similar warranty for a much lower cost. And they're proven in the real world.

      Anyone needing that small latency advantage for random access workloads already has something much better. RAM.
      Even with the ridiculous RAM prices now, the trend is moving to in-memory computing for workloads that benefit from it.

    11. Re:Trash by sexconker · · Score: 1

      If you care about latency you're going to want to just keep your shit in RAM. That's the trend on the enterprise side.

      Consumers and even high end gamers do not benefit from that small latency advantage. Optane drives only beat traditional drives when you do synthetic, random access tests or crank the queue depth down for no reason. People moving large files don't benefit. Gamers don't benefit - assets are loaded from sequential blobs and (ideally) kept in RAM/VRAM. People working with media and shit don't benefit as their video/design/etc. files are big sequential blobs.

      About the only real life, consumer level workloads that I can see benefiting are virus scans and code compiling.

      The focus on latency by review sites is because INTEL IS PAYING THEM.

      This started back with the 900P on PC Perspective. PC Perspective developed their own benchmark just for reviewing these new drives from Intel.

      https://www.pcper.com/reviews/...

      Except, that's not what happened. What happened was Intel approached "Shrout Research", which is run by Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective. Intel paid him money for a "white paper", gave him samples of the product for that white paper, and gave him direction on what the white paper should say and how to test things.

      PC Perspective then took the conclusions from the white paper and presented it as an unbiased review, without disclosing the fact that the site owner was paid for that shit, or that the site was using the samples given for the "white paper" as the samples tested in the review (which is why they had so many to test with when other sites were lucky to get one), or that they white paper even existed.

      PC Perspective got called out on all of this. Their response? Adding a vague disclaimer to the very end of the very last page of the review.

      Disclaimer:

      Ownership of PC Perspective also operates consulting firm Shrout Research. Shrout Research has provided research, consulting, and analysis for many companies in the high-tech industry including AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Arm. A white paper was published by Shrout Research using 900P engineering samples and was commissioned by Intel. All testing for this review was conducted separately and on retail samples of the 900P. This review was not commissioned or sponsored by Intel.

      That disclaimer should actually say: Intel paid for this review and our new testing methodology that focuses on the only thing that Optane is good at.

      We know that the review testing was not conducted separately from the white paper (people have gone through both and shown that shit was copied) and we know that they didn't buy their own retail products to test with (based on the date the review was published and the availability of the product).

      PC Perspective has been scrambling to downplay this and spin it ever since some Scottish YouTube guy called them out on this shit. But at the end of the day, tech sites that review these things are suddenly starting to care about latency as the biggest thing? GEE, I WONDER WHY!

    12. Re: Trash by sexconker · · Score: 1

      Careful there, not sure about these particular ones but Intel's current crop emaciates the Samsung even though on paper and synthetical benchmarks (IOPS and transfer rate) the Samsung does better.

      Testing it myself, the Samsung does good until you transfer ~2-3GB and then it drops like a brick to the lower 1000s of IOPS instead of the 100,000 or more it gave you.

      The problem there is that Samsung gives you a good RAM cache (backed up with huge capacitors on their DataCenter models) but once you request synced rates or exceed that cache, the controller lags behind. In the mean time, the Intel continues chugging along at 70-90k IOPS.

      What drive are you testing, exactly? Is it an NVMe drive?
      Are you using the proper drivers from Samsung? If you're on Windows, the default driver from MS is kind of shitty. You'll want to download the NVMe driver from Samsung. I'm not sure what the situation is on Linux.

      The 960 series from Samsung has much better sustained IOPS performance after reaching steady state and in an extended load than the 950 series. It approaches that of the Samsung/Intel enterprise drives (which have gobs of over provisioning). I'm not sure how the 860 series behaves, but that's limited by SATA anyway.

      You can drastically improve minimum IOPS by increasing over provisioning using Samsung Magician. I haven't tried this on any of the boxes I care about performance on, though. On those I use RAID.

    13. Re:Trash by KingMotley · · Score: 1

      I would say for every spec that matters, optane is a huge improvement over both the Samsung 950 and 960. I had two Samsung 950 PRO's (in RAID-0), and then replaced them with a single 960 PRO. Just like the linked article shows, performance on these are all over the place, often not demonstrating good performance until you hit high queue depths, which isn't "common" for a single user desktop.

      Just a quick test I ran just now shows read speeds of 1903MB/s, and write of 1076MB/s. And then a second run show 1724/938. Unpredictable and bursty. Optane is just better at maintaining a consistent speed because of the low latencies. That also means it works better with single threaded applications no matter if they use large buffer or small, overlapped I/O or not. So poorly written applications (from an I/O perspective -- which a LOT are) will actually perform much better.

  3. What is Optane for? by PhunkySchtuff · · Score: 1

    Maybe it's just me, but I struggle to see the point of Optane as compared to a regular flash-based SSD.
    From what. I can see, it's optimised as a high speed but small SSD that can then be used as a cache for a spinning HDD.
    In the benchmarks I've seen however, it doesn't seem to be markedly faster than a fast M.2 NVMe SSD.

    --
    Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
    1. Re:What is Optane for? by erice · · Score: 2

      Maybe it's just me, but I struggle to see the point of Optane as compared to a regular flash-based SSD.
      From what. I can see, it's optimised as a high speed but small SSD that can then be used as a cache for a spinning HDD.
      In the benchmarks I've seen however, it doesn't seem to be markedly faster than a fast M.2 NVMe SSD.

      It is on the wrong interface speaking the wrong protocol. It needs to be connected to the DDR interface for the low latency, fast writes, and word-unit access of 3D-Xpoint to shine. But we are still waiting for that product. When the first NVMe Optane came out, many watchers thought that it indicated some yield issues that more complex and higher latency NVMe interface could cover up but that would make it difficult to make a DDR connected device functional. Maybe Intel is still having trouble.

    2. Re:What is Optane for? by cb88 · · Score: 2

      Not really, non of the 3d Xpoint drives are pushing what PCIE is capable of yet... the NVME protocol is pretty simple as well. Samsung drives are starting to hit some limits at least while thier cache can keep up... but as already stated they run out of steam after a bit.

      One thing causing problems is interrupt driven disk drivers instead of polling SSDs these days are so fast that polling is starting to make more sense than assuming it will take awhile for the disk to get back to you with the data.... there's been some talk about this recently in the Linux kernel mailing list.

    3. Re:What is Optane for? by m.dillon · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well, NVMe is a multi-queue spec. The best drivers and chipsets for it will assign a command and response queue to each cpu in the system. This allows for both lockless queuing operation as well as polling with no cross-cpu contamination. In this regard, NVMe is far, far superior to AHCI (aka SATA, which has only one queue for multiple targets) and SAS chipsets (which typically are not multi-queue).

      At 10uS, though, interrupt overhead (with MSI-X vectoring per-cpu) still yields superior cpu-v-data performance. Interrupt overhead is only around ~1uS or so. Still, its getting close. At lower latencies polling will definitely be a win. But even at 10uS, interrupt driven operation still leaves the cpu with extra clocks to do other work in that it wouldn't have with polling.

      Another problem is that NVMe chipsets generally don't have anywhere near the 1023+ queues supported by the spec. They usually come in at no more than 31 queues, which is not enough to assign one to each cpu thread on heftier systems. The chipset spec can support a lot more... in fact, many more MSI-X interrupts can be supported as well, but we just don't see it out in the field.

      Most chipsets only offer 8 queues, which is near worthless on modern multi-core cpus.

      nvme0: Model SAMSUNG_MZVPV128HDGM-00000 BaseSerial S1XVNYAGA03031 nscount=1
      nvme0: Request 64/32 queues, Returns 8/8 queues, rw-sep map (8, 8)
      nvme1: Model Samsung_SSD_960_EVO_250GB BaseSerial S3ESNX0J219064Y nscount=1
      nvme1: Request 64/32 queues, Returns 8/8 queues, rw-sep map (8, 8)
      nvme2: Model INTEL_SSDPEKKW256G7 BaseSerial BTPY64430Q5B256D nscount=1
      nvme2: Request 64/32 queues, Returns 8/8 queues, rw-sep map (8, 8)
      nvme3: Model TOSHIBA-RD400 BaseSerial Z6TS10AUTPEV nscount=1
      nvme3: Request 64/32 queues, Returns 7/7 queues, rw-sep map (7, 7)
      nvme4: Model WDC_WDS256G1X0C-00ENX0 BaseSerial 170369420988 nscount=1
      nvme4: Request 64/32 queues, Returns 16/16 queues, rw-sep map (16, 16)
      nvme5: Model BPX BaseSerial 8B7107720F0823024374 nscount=1
      nvme5: Request 64/32 queues, Returns 7/7 queues, rw-sep map (7, 7)
      nvme6: Model PLEXTOR_PX-256M8PeG BaseSerial P02652102851 nscount=1
      nvme6: Request 64/32 queues, Returns 16/16 queues, rw-sep map (16, 16)

      Eventually we'll start to see chipsets that implement closer to the queue limit in the spec, at which point we can theoretically assign a queue pair to every active user thread using the storage. But for now I would be happy if chipsets just gave us enough queues to implement two per cpu thread (for priority separation).

      Also, Intel NVMe SSDs are *NORTORIOUSLY* bad in multi-queue configurations. Performance is far poorer than other vendors placed in the same configuration. I think this is rather ironic, actually. Intel markets low latency, but their chipsets can't handle it in the real-life configurations that NVMe was designed for.

      -Matt

    4. Re:What is Optane for? by EETech1 · · Score: 2

      Matt, thank you as always for your comments, and contributions.

      If the Optane drive is significantly faster at low queue depths, does that mean that it is capable of maintaining a lower queue depth for longer by servicing them faster, preventing the depth from growing?

  4. Re:What is Optane for? - Non-Volatile is What! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The promise of Optane/X-Point is Non-Volatile memory IMHO. I'd love a system with instant boot/wake up.
    Like in my car's in-dash computer that takes too long to boot and display the backup camera. Linux would
    need to have some work done on it do deal with extended "off" times, but I wish that this would come to
    pass ASAP.

  5. Expensive by thewebsiteboy · · Score: 1

    This stuff is still kinda expensive, I wonder who even buys this

    1. Re:Expensive by cb88 · · Score: 1

      I could see this ending up in a lot of industrial systems for instance that need high reliability as well as performance but not much disk space...

  6. Is this finally the fix? by slashmydots · · Score: 2

    Here's the short version of SSD history for the last 2 years. Micron bought Elpida or whatever and now there are 2 manufacturers of flash chips instead of 3. Suddenly there's a giant shortage on DDR4, GDDR5, and all flash products that store data. WHAT A COINCIDENCE. I'm sure it's not price fixing and artificial shortages caused by the almost monopoly that some asshole Asian regulators allowed the be made by the merger. So Intel's kinda big. Do they have their own flash chip manufacturing plant so there's FINALLY a third competitor back in the market or are they just having one of those two crooked rackets make Optane chips?

    1. Re:Is this finally the fix? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      so there's FINALLY a third competitor back in the market or are they just having one of those two crooked rackets make Optane chips?

      Even IF Intel is making it itself, it doesn't really matter in the "optane is too expensive for what it is" context.

    2. Re:Is this finally the fix? by KingMotley · · Score: 1

      Uh... You do realize that Micron is a US company, not asian, right?

  7. Not really a consumer product by m.dillon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    These are not really consumer products. Basically what you get out of an Optane drive is more durability (hence 10DWPB instead of 0.3DWPD @ 5 year warranty), and low latencies at low queue depths ( 10uS @ QD1 instead of 30uS+ @ QD1 for a NAND drive, random read).

    But that's it. Everything else about Optane is non-competitive with NAND, at least so far. The price is ridiculous, the throughput at higher queue depths isn't really all that impressive.

    No consumer is going to notice the lower latencies at low queue depths for the types of activities Intel advertises the product for (such as gaming), because all of those activities involve bulk reading and writing which NAND does very well, and most involve a certain degree of sequential reading or writing which modern NAND drives (such as the Samsungs) optimize very well. At higher queue depths the Intel advantage goes away entirely, so it wouldn't move the needle even for concurrent random server workloads.

    Consumers for the most part never hit the actual durability limits of a NAND drive. For one, even with the lower durability the NAND drive is typically going to be double or triple the capacity of the Optane drive at the same price point, and for two, consumer use cases do not usually do 10 full drive writes per day over the life of the device or anything even close to that.

    Basically, like the idiotic optane 'disk cache' Intel tried to hawk last year, this drive is a pretty bad fit as a consumer device. In this offering Intel at least put the proper durability that Optane is *supposed* to have in the specs. Around 8900TB... nothing to sneeze at when most NAND drives have durabilities in the 200-400TB range. There is something to be said for that, even without real-life integrity/retention data available yet. But... it's still just not a consumer-oriented device.

    -Matt

    1. Re:Not really a consumer product by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      These aren't consumer drives and nor are they aimed at consumers. The only place that general consumers are mentioned is the fucked up piece of shit /, summary

    2. Re:Not really a consumer product by larryjoe · · Score: 1

      In this offering Intel at least put the proper durability that Optane is *supposed* to have in the specs. Around 8900TB... nothing to sneeze at when most NAND drives have durabilities in the 200-400TB range.

      But the NAND drive has such relatively low endurance due to economic motivations. SLC NAND has significantly higher endurance at a higher price point. The consumer market requires the lower price point. What would the Optane endurance be when scaled and designed for the consumer-viable price point?

    3. Re:Not really a consumer product by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lower latency directly translates to more throughput. Especially for bulk, serial IO, which is most sustained workloads on a desktop. 1/3 the latency is 3x the iops. Of course that will be noticeable when a game is loading GB of textures from disk... at QD 1, 10us is literally three times more throughout than 30us for a given block size.

    4. Re:Not really a consumer product by swb · · Score: 1

      I just can't get over the capacities. Is the difference in performance between Optane and SSD significant enough to make the resulting complex architectures of including relatively small Optane drives into a storage environment even worth the effort?

      My long-term take is that the best performing caching and tiering storage systems really only provided marginal performance improvements at significant price premiums and involved complex controller architectures to manage it. And of course the performance improvement often had a bunch of gotchas -- hours or days of controller block usage analysis, didn't work with a lot of read/write use cases, etc.

      I'd personally rather have a storage system made up of uniform elements that at least delivered predictable performance across the entire range of use cases with densities in the neighborhood of what's normal.

  8. What? by Xenolith0 · · Score: 1

    I thinking I'm missing the point of these.
    More expensive than a Samsung EVO 960.
    Smaller than a 960.
    Half the read performance of a 960.
    Half the write performance of a 960.

    I was excited when I first read the headline, I thought, FINALLY samsung will have some competition again and prices will come down. So much for that dream

    1. Re:What? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You're not paying attention to specifics then.

      The 118GB Optane SSD 800P has lower latency than the 1TB Samsung SSD 960 Pro.
      The 118GB Optane SSD 800P has higher burst write throughput than the 1TB Samsung SSD 960 Pro.
      The 118GB Optane SSD 800P has lower CPU usage during writes than the 1TB Samsung SSD 960 Pro.

      The only tests that the 118GB Optane SSD 800P consistency lost at were sequential throughput tests.

  9. One of the best by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    one of the bet with VIVO ipl 2018 https://goo.gl/PvyX37

  10. Optane is disappointing by WaffleMonster · · Score: 1

    The hype gave way to reality and the devil you don't know with underwhelming TBW v. flash when price factored in. I've got to hand it to Intel for at least trying something other than flash but Xpoint is fundamentally a lost cause in terms of mass appeal.

    I pray for silicon gods to mass-produce super high density MRAM and put flash out of its misery. While the IOPs are impressive using this capacity in any kind of sustained way is basically impossible with current SSD systems. You'd fry the damn thing in a matter of days.

  11. 2 orders of magnitude shy of belt and suspenders by epine · · Score: 1

    These are not really consumer products. Basically what you get out of an Optane drive is more durability (hence 10DWPB instead of 0.3DWPD @ 5 year warranty), and low latencies at low queue depths ( 10uS @ QD1 instead of 30uS+ @ QD1 for a NAND drive, random read).

    Google calc: 10 * 58 GB / (3 GB/s * 24 hours ) = 0.22% gum-stick NVME duty cycle

    I've plucked interface bandwidth from the article:

    NVMe M.2 gumsticks offering >3GB/s

    With a mere two more orders of magnitude of endurance, this small Optane product would make a perfect ZFS SLOG drive (aka ZIL).

    The 3 GB/s bandwidth on an M.2 gum-stick is not unreasonable for a busy(ish) ZFS server rated for peak operation over at most a 20% operational duty cycle (34 hours per week).

    And this is not unreasonable ZIL write bandwidth once you declare all NFS write traffic 100% synchronous (per the standard), which BSD really wants to do in the first place (Linux not so much, last time I checked).

    I'm pretty sure this slack-ass durability is why the memory product is so long delayed.

    Just imagine if I had plugged in the bandwidth of an entire DDR4 lane.

    The plan worked too well, restoring Holly to an I.Q. of 6,000 then on to more than 12,000, but at the cost of reducing her lifespan to minutes and forcing Holly to shut herself down to preserve what little time she had left.

    If Holly didn't contain some future Intel Optane product, I'll eat my radioactive hair net requisition forms.

    Holly Returns

    Kicking bottom, or what?