Intel Optane SSD

“More of these would be immensely helpful, right about now given the inference landscape.”

“it's starting to show it's age and the gen4 gear is both old-ish and still expensive”

“The latency improvement when I switched from a Samsung 990 to the P5800X wasn't quite as mind-blowing or revelatory”

“They're the fastest but I wouldn't suggest running out and buying one because you're avoiding a 16GB to 32GB upgrade”

“Optane has better write endurance and latency then even the newest flash.”

“It still has much better latency than modern NVMEs and much, much better write endurance”

“I agree that its a good, long-lasting fix, but when was the last time you checked the pricing on those?”

“it is slower than real RAM by a good amount for latency, but you can get similar bandwidth”

“if Intel Optane had hung around a little longer, it would now be one of the highest growth products at Intel”

“Optane was still much slower than Ram. And not that much faster than NVME (theoretically)”

“wearout-resistant and has DDR3-like performance for 10% of current DRAM prices”

“reduce the latencies further by buying cheap Optane memory on the second-hand market”

“it's even got an optane boot drive so that'll last till the end of time”

“it's the wearout resistance which opens up the possibility of storing KV-cache”

“Intel Optane drives are worth experimenting with for the latter (they are stuck on PCIe 4.0) purely for their good random-read properties”

“you can get that cheaply on a modern system by getting Intel Optane NVMe/PCIe media”

“Eliminating metadata from your drives seeking and letting them be written nearly instantly with Optane does wonderful things for spinning rust”

“If optane failed, it was probably because Intel didn't like the economics of pricing it to succeed.”

“the actual difference in DWPD per spec sheets is more like two or three orders of magnitude”

“That conflation of Optane storage as "memory", hinting that this was equal to RAM, turned many people against it”

“Yes, Optane would survive more writes. But it wouldn't survive more TBW/$, because much larger flash drives were available cheaper.”

“Optane practical TBW endurance is way higher than that of even TLC flash”

“And their whole deal was making RAM persistent anyway, which isn't exactly what I want.”

“they were absolutely king of the hill at mixed workloads because, as you note, time to first byte was so low”

“noticeably faster to boot your machine than even the fastest available Flash SSD”

“It's so incredibly fast and responsive that the LuCI interface completely loads the moment I hit enter on the login form.”

“Intel had no roadmap to significantly improve Optane's $/GB which was unquestionably the technology's biggest weakness.”

“Write-heavy workloads are king with Optane, and threshing to swap is the prototypical example”

“if you take into account that Optane is going to live >>10x longer than a SSD”

“Optane was crazy good tech, it way just too expensive at the time for mass adoption, but the benefits were so good.”

“Would sure be fun to play around with a 500 core Knights CPU with a couple TB of optane for LLM inference.”

“Optane was a victim of its own hype, such as "entirely new physics", or "as fast as RAM, but persistent".”

“I want proper phase-change persistent memory. Bring back Intel Optane and hook it up to a modern, high-performance PCIe bus.”

“It's also tremendously durable, NAND doesn't get close in write endurance.”

“they were power-intensive enough that this particular use probably wouldn't be feasible”

“bring back frickin Optane and hook it up to a modern PCIe bus with modern PCIe performance”

“Intel's Optane has given us a brief glimpse into what such a future could look like but, alas, that particular version of the future has not panned out.”

“For durable low latency writes there really is nothing else out there.”

“the Optane media has better latency and far better DWPD endurance than existing NAND SSD's”

“those are 6+ dwpd depending on model which may as well be unlimited for personal use scenarios”