back to article Happy Motherboards day: Here's some (Optane) memory

Hot on the heels of the Optane DC P4800X data centre SSD announcement, Intel makes a move on PC motherboard memory. Optane uses co-developed Intel and Micron 3D XPoint memory, said to be not as fast as DRAM, but faster than NAND, while having NAND's non-volatility and pricing between the two. The M.2-connected Optane 2280 …

  1. Daniel von Asmuth
    Holmes

    rank and file

    "Files needed for important tasks are immediately recognised and accelerated".

    I suppose that the optane can recognise the stars on bars on the user's uniform and will generally accelarate a general's files generously, give a major's files a major boost, but won't blow off a captain's cap.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re: rank and file

      Who's general failure ?

      And why is he reading my disk ?

  2. Novex

    Two Lanes

    If it's supposed to be a flash beater, why limit it to two lanes when there are M.2 flash drives that already use four lanes...?

    1. druck Silver badge

      Re: Two Lanes

      Because the technology doesn't live up to the hype, and they don't want like for like comparisons.

  3. Ed

    That infographic is silly, I can't really believe that the _average_ user restarts their computer twice a day and opens apps 77 times. I can't see the source, but I bet they were paid by Intel.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Not only that, they based their speed comparison between a PC with a high end Z270 motherboard and top range i7 CPU with a 1 TB hard drive and the same with the Optane m.2 card. Who is going to buy such a high end PC without an SSD? No one, that's who! I guess it doesn't show any useful speed up when measured against a PC configured in a sane manner.

    2. Hans 1
      Joke

      >That infographic is silly, I can't really believe that the _average_ user restarts their computer twice a day and opens apps 77 times.

      Windows users do that every hour!

  4. LaeMing
    Linux

    32 GiB!

    Screw fancy acceleration algorithms! I can run my entire OS, applications and userspace out of that!

    1. Francis Boyle

      Re: 32 GiB!

      Perhaps the fact that Intel is not promoting such use tells us something.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Server use

    Does this appear to the OS just like a flash drive would appear? Then I could use it for ZFS intent log or bcache or whatever, which is good. At 32GB it's not really big enough to be useful for anything else.

    However, Intel's specs say this is only supported on Kaby Lake processors and chipsets - why is that? Surely NVMe is NVMe? Is this actually a proprietary interface?

    The potential benefits over SSD might be:

    - longer durability

    - not being tied to a block-erase cycle for writes

    The latter could make a big difference. I have seen SSDs where the write throughput has dropped from 200MB/sec to 10MB/sec after a few minutes of sequential writes, because of thermal throttling from all of those erase cycles.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Server use

      Can't find it at the moment, but I saw some specs for Optane yesterday that listed the max power draw at 18 watts. Unless there was a decimal accidentally left out of that, I think it may be subject to thermal throttling under heavy use as well.

  6. paul-m-w72

    Benchmarks

    LTT has benchmarks

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO_fh450u6Y

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