Evaluation Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has confirmed that Intel will exit its Optane enterprise, ending its try and create and promote a degree of reminiscence that was considerably slower than RAM however had the virtues of persistence and Excessive IOPS.
The information ought to come as no shock, nonetheless. The division has been on life help for a while after Micron’s choice in 2018 to finish its three way partnership with Intel, promoting the manufacturing unit the place the 3D XPoint chips that go into Optane drives and modules have been made. Whereas Intel has signaled that it’s open to utilizing third-party foundries, with out the means to fabricate its personal Optane silicon, the writing was on the wall.
As our sister website Blocks and Information reported in Could, the sale solely got here after Micron bought Intel a glut of 3D XPoint reminiscence modules — greater than the chipmaker may promote. Estimates place Intel’s stock at round two years’ provide.
In its poor second-quarter earnings report, Intel stated exiting Optane would lead to $559 million in stock write-downs. In different phrases, the corporate abandons the undertaking and writes off the stock as a loss.
The deal additionally marks the tip of Intel’s SSD enterprise. Two years in the past, Intel bought its NAND flash enterprise and manufacturing plans to SK hynix to focus its efforts on the Optane enterprise.
Introduced in 2015, 3D XPoint reminiscence arrived within the type of Intel’s Optane SSDs two years later. Nevertheless, not like competitor SSDs, Optane SSDs couldn’t compete in capability or pace. As a substitute, the gadgets provided among the greatest I/O efficiency available on the market, a high quality that made them notably enticing in latency-sensitive purposes the place IOPS have been extra necessary than throughput. Intel claimed that its PCIe 4.0-based P5800X SSDs may obtain as much as 1.6 million IOPS
Intel has additionally used 3D XPoint in its Optane persistent reminiscence DIMMs, notably across the launch of its second- and third-generation Xeon Scalable processors.
From a distance, Intel’s Optane DIMMs regarded no completely different than your common DDR4, besides, maybe, as a warmth sink. Nevertheless, on nearer inspection, the DIMMs may have capacities far past what is feasible with DDR4 reminiscence in the present day. Capacities of 512 GB per DIMM weren’t unusual.
DIMMs slotted alongside commonplace DDR4 and enabled a variety of new use instances, together with a tiered reminiscence structure that was primarily clear to working system software program. When deployed on this means, DDR reminiscence was handled as a big degree 4 cache, with Optane reminiscence behaving like system reminiscence.
Whereas providing efficiency removed from akin to DRAM, the method enabled the deployment of very giant memory-intensive workloads, equivalent to databases, at a fraction of the price of an equal quantity of DDR4, with out requiring software program customization. That was the concept, anyway.
Optane DIMMs can be configured to behave as a high-performance storage machine or as a mixture of storage and reminiscence.
And now?
Though DDR5 guarantees to resolve among the capability points addressed by Optane persistent reminiscence, with 512GB DIMM capacities deliberate, it’s unlikely to be worth aggressive.
DDR is not getting cheaper — no less than not shortly — however NAND flash costs are falling as provide outstrips demand. All of the whereas, SSDs are getting sooner and sooner.
Micron this week started quantity manufacturing of a 232-layer module that can push shopper SSDs into over 10GB/sec territory. It is nonetheless not quick or low-latency sufficient to interchange Optane for giant in-memory workloads, analysts say The registerbut it surely comes awfully near the 17 GB/sec provided by a single channel of low-end DDR4.
So if NAND is not the reply, then what? Properly, there may be truly an Optane reminiscence various on the horizon. It is referred to as Compute Categorical Hyperlink (CXL) and Intel has already invested closely within the expertise. Launched in 2019, CXL defines a cache-coherent interface for connecting processors, reminiscence, accelerators, and different peripherals.
CXL 1.1, which is able to ship with Intel’s Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable processors and AMD’s fourth-generation Eypc Genoa and Bergamo processors later this yr, permits reminiscence to be linked on to the CPU through the PCIe 5.0 hyperlink.
Distributors equivalent to Samsung and Marvell are already planning reminiscence enlargement modules that slot into PCIe like a GPU and supply a big pool of extra capability for memory-intensive workloads.
Marvell’s acquisition of Tanzanite this spring will permit the seller to additionally provide Optane-like tiered reminiscence performance.
Moreover, for the reason that reminiscence is dealt with by a CXL controller on the enlargement board, older and cheaper DDR4 and even DDR3 modules could possibly be used alongside fashionable DDR5 DIMMs. On this regard, CXL-based reminiscence tiering is perhaps superior as a result of it doesn’t depend on a specialised reminiscence structure like 3D XPoint.
VMware is considering software-defined reminiscence that shares reminiscence from a server to different bins – an effort that will likely be way more highly effective if it makes use of a typical like CXL.
Nevertheless, emulation of some facets of Intel’s Optane persistent reminiscence might have to attend till the primary CXL 2.0-capable processors – which is able to add help for reminiscence pooling and switching – come to market. It additionally stays to be seen how the software program interacts with CXL reminiscence modules in multilevel reminiscence purposes. ®
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