News Smart Modular Brings Optane Memory to AMD EPYC Servers

[Admin]

Smart's new add-in-card brings Intel's Optane Persistent Memory to AMD and Arm servers.

Smart Modular Brings Optane Memory to AMD EPYC Servers : Read more

 

[abufrejoval]

Cool!

Very niche, but cool nevertheless.

I've been very disappointed when Martin Fink's 2014 projections about the memristor replacing everything from DRAM to tape wound up nothing but hot air and a split HP.

But to see that Intel's attempt to the make runner-up phase change materials exclusive to Intel has finally failed, is actually a bit sweet.

I thought production of Optane had already stopped with both Micron and Intel discarding their bits, but for a niche so small, enough stockpiles may be left.

If someone doesn't know where to send a leftover, I'd be volunteering to take two or three!

They'll be a quite natural replacement for the FusionIO boards I'm recycling from a previous life in a lab.

 

[TerryLaze]

But to see that Intel's attempt to the make runner-up phase change materials exclusive to Intel has finally failed, is actually a bit sweet.

You still need an intel system to make it show up as ram, this is just ram on a pci card which is nothing new, it only shows up as storage, which is something compared to nothing at all but it doesn't give you all the major benefits.

 

[abufrejoval]

You still need an intel system to make it show up as ram, this is just ram on a pci card which is nothing new, it only shows up as storage, which is something compared to nothing at all but it doesn't give you all the major benefits.

Well if you want to take advantage of its non-volatility, you may have to tailor your software anyway. And then from what I've learned nobody would mistake Optane for RAM in any case, because the performance is significantly slower, even if it sits on the memory bus.

And if you in fact you do (mistake it for RAM), there is a bit of a chance you'll block off an entire memory channel (with lots of RAM-DIMMs) waiting for NV-DIMM requests to release it. Storage has been accessed asynchronously "forever", even virtual memory access won't tie a memory channel on page faults. But with dramatically slower NV-DIMMs sharing a memory channel with DRAM, I think I'd rather prefer storage semantics in most cases, because DIMM access is synchronous and thus blocking.

Once you have a dedicated software layer, the actually interconnect via memory channels or PCIe becomes a bit less of an issue and the future is supposed to be CXL anyway. Which brings me to the question: how will that deal with excessive latencies on memory-mapped storage?

P.S.: how far ahead is there even support for Optane in Intel memory controllers?

 

[msroadkill612]

ur above my pay grade, but yes, i was going to say "virtual memory", & yes - if anything that sounds simpler to adapt software to than mixing nand into ram slots.

To this newb it seems surreal that intel cunningly made their strategic optane weapon so exclusive, that nobody came onboard, & a potential hit product just withered away.

 

[abufrejoval]

To this newb it seems surreal that intel cunningly made their strategic optane weapon so exclusive, that nobody came onboard, & a potential hit product just withered away.

Surreal or not, a potential monopoly holds such terrible attraction an IT company will spend billions to get there.

Intel's earliest trauma was losing the DRAM market to Japanese commodity makers in the mid 1980's.

And then Intel has learned from IBM's mainframe business which maintained ECL-class exclusivity even after switching to CMOS commodity technology.

It also owes most of its success to being able to kick out the proprietary Unix market with the price point that commodity PC based ISA technology offered.

Intel consistently dreams up ways of selling exclusive value at commodity production cost. They always dream big and they have failed big quite a few times already. And because the industry knows exactly what Intel is trying to achieve, often enough they have refused to go where Intel wanted them (e.g. Itanium, Xeon Phi, Omnipath), because they knew they'd have to pay heavily once the dependency was there.

 

[msroadkill612]

Surreal or not, a potential monopoly holds such terrible attraction an IT company will spend billions to get there.

Intel's earliest trauma was losing the DRAM market to Japanese commodity makers in the mid 1980's.

And then Intel has learned from IBM's mainframe business which maintained ECL-class exclusivity even after switching to CMOS commodity technology.

It also owes most of its success to being able to kick out the proprietary Unix market with the price point that commodity PC based ISA technology offered.

Intel consistently dreams up ways of selling exclusive value at commodity production cost. They always dream big and they have failed big quite a few times already. And because the industry knows exactly what Intel is trying to achieve, often enough they have refused to go where Intel wanted them (e.g. Itanium, Xeon Phi, Omnipath), because they knew they'd have to pay heavily once the dependency was there.

Ta for the cool history lesson.
We may well be witnessing an historic mortal miscalculation this time, with their haughty view of any threat by AMD to the core of their hegemony.
If it is as u say, the big buyers must love the new deal & embrace it warmly.