Why was Optane so good with random access? Why did Intel abandon the tech?
Thrashy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The trouble with ridiculous R/W numbers like these US not that there’s no theoretical benefit to faster storage access, it’s that the quoted numbers are always for sequential access, whereas most desktop workloads are more frequently closer to random, which flash memory kinda sucks at, with even really good SSDs only delivering ~100MB/sec in pure random access scenarios. This is why you don’t really feel any difference between a decent PCIe 3.0 M.2 drive and one of these insane-o PCI-E 5.0 drives, unless you’re doing a lot of bulk copying of large files on a regular basis.
It’s also why Intel Optane drives became the steal of the century when they went on clearance after Intel abandoned the tech. Optane is basically as fast in random access as in sequential access, which means that in some scenarios even a PCIe 3.0 Optane drive can feel much, much snappier than a PCIe 4 .0 or 5.0 SSD that looks faster on paper.
Gg901@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
rice@lemmy.org 3 weeks ago
didn’t sell well. I assume if they were able to combine it with todays need for NVRAM on a GPU for AI they would have gotten it sold a bunch. I am surprised we don’t see “pcie ram expansion pack” for the GPUs from nvidia yet
Welp_im_damned@lemdro.id 3 weeks ago
Intel became broke and they had to cut it.
Eideen@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Agree 1 lane of pci4.0 per M.2 SSD is enough.
Give me more slots instead.
kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Au contraire, flash is amazing at random R/W compared to all previous non-volatile technologies. The fastest hard drives can do what, 4MB/s with 4k sectors, assuming a quarter rotation per random seek? And that’s still fantastic compared to optical media, which in turn is way better than tape.
Obviously, volatile memory like SDRAM puts it to shame, but I’m a pretty big fan of being able to reboot.
Thrashy@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Fair point. My thrust was more that the reason why things like system boot times and software launch speeds don’t seem to benefit as much as they seem like they should when moving from, say, a good SATA SSD (peak R/W speed: 600 MB/sec) to a fast m.2 that might have listed speeds 20+ times faster, is that QD1 performance of that m.2 drive might only be 3 or 4 times better than the SATA drive. Both are a big step up from spinning media, but the gap between the two in random read speed isn’t big enough to make a huge subjective difference in many desktop use cases.