Tuesday, November 14th 2017
Intel Readies Optane DIMM Roll-out for 2018
Intel has reportedly slated launch of its Optane DIMM for the second half of 2018. The Optane DIMM marks the biggest change in computer memory in over two decades, and heralds the era of "persistent memory," which combines the best characteristics of DRAM and NAND flash, in that it has the speed and low-latency of DRAM, but the persistence (ability to store data in the absence of power) of NAND flash. Combining the two will be made possible with improvements to the speed and latency of 3D XPoint memory. Intel is currently selling consumer SSDs based on the technology, and has increased production of 3D XPoint chips.
Intel presented the Optane DIMM at the 2017 USB Global Technology Conference. It described Optane DIMM as a primary storage device that will function as a memory-mapped device, but with much higher storage densities than what's possible with current DDR4 DRAM. The enterprise segment, as usual, will have the first take of the technology, with Intel targeting the exascale computing (supercomputers nearing ExaFLOP/s compute throughput) industry, trickling down to other enterprise segments, before finally making its way to the client/consumer segments. This development is also a polite nudge to the DRAM industry to get its act together, and either bring down prices or scale up densities, or miss the bus of change.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
Intel presented the Optane DIMM at the 2017 USB Global Technology Conference. It described Optane DIMM as a primary storage device that will function as a memory-mapped device, but with much higher storage densities than what's possible with current DDR4 DRAM. The enterprise segment, as usual, will have the first take of the technology, with Intel targeting the exascale computing (supercomputers nearing ExaFLOP/s compute throughput) industry, trickling down to other enterprise segments, before finally making its way to the client/consumer segments. This development is also a polite nudge to the DRAM industry to get its act together, and either bring down prices or scale up densities, or miss the bus of change.
24 Comments on Intel Readies Optane DIMM Roll-out for 2018
... looking forward
4 for memory @ 128 GB, and 4 for Optane, @ 2TB (8TB total)
with all of it running @ 100000 MB/s.... and with 64-128 CPU cores @ 3 - 4 GHz
:twitch:
We are on the cusp of a huge change in PC performance, IMHO. I don't know that most enthusiasts are really ready for it.
You have to get out of today, and look far into the future. Money and costs are the least of my concern about this.
It will benefit server applications and some HPC significantly, enabling what was previously impossible. However for mainstream consumers, all it can do is to offer better $/GB with worse memory performance (anyway, memory performance isn’t that important these days).
Just don't ecxpect these to have same throughput as RAM. Similar or close yes, same, no. So, I'm assuming this won't be ideal for all tasks. Storage heavy operations like servers will likely greatly benefit from it. And compact devices like laptops.
The main reason for moving XPoint to DIMM is bandwidth-latency though. In its current SSD applications, it does seem to be constrained by both controller and interface, both of which can be considerably improved on within the current standards and paradigm by moving to DIMM.
There will still be shuffling data in and out of different levels of memory. That will not change and depending on how it will get implemented on all hardware-firmware-software, it might actually get more data being shuffled around if the end result justifies it.
But how much is an Optane DIMM vs RAM+SSD?
[LEFT]I actually think that this will only support a single Optane device, not multiple (as current Optane drives work this way). You might also note that the projected launch is 2nd half next year, which could mean this time next year for all we know, so details are going to be a bit lean on what exactly is going on for quite some time yet.[/LEFT]