Intel Optane DCPMM Coming to Workstations

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Edu

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Aug 8, 2017
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I think it's misleading to say that Intel Optane DC gives Intel an advantage over AMD. Memory prices have dropped so low that equipping a machine with Optane DC is now more expensive than using the equivalent DDR4 config (going by list prices). Also, Optane DC is incredibly slow compared to DDR4 (6 times less bandwidth and 4 times more latency)
 
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etorix

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Sep 28, 2021
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Dear forumers,

Years later, not much of Optane DCPMM has been seen on the desktop. Yet I feel a GAS-like itch to experiment with DCPMM and try to understand the situation across the (mother)boards.

Supermicro is the reference implementation with the full "glorious complexity" of Memory Mode, Application Direct and Mixed Mode across the whole X11SP_, X11DP_, X12SP_ and X12DP_ linup. But these boards, even the workstation ones, do not sleep (S3), which isn't nice on the desktop.

AsRockRack supports only Memory Mode on C621 boards. And there's not much clarity as to what is supported on C621A.

Gigabyte "black PCB" boards (C621-SU8/SD12/WD12) do not support Optane DCPMM; this feature is only for the more enterprise-focussed "blue PCB", such as MD71-HB0. Memory Mode and App Direct are mentioned but not Mixed Mode, and there's nothing clear in the BIOS manual.

Asus is like Gigabyte: No support on workstation boards, only on server boards (Z11PA-U12)—with even less advertisement than from Gigabyte.

Is the above correct? What's your experience and what would you advise?
Should I perhaps resist the itch and just forget because on one hand there's no use case for Optane DCPMM compared to just stuffing one's computer with cheaper RAM and/or fast NVMe drives, and because on the other hand there are reasons why not much has been added since the 2019 STH piece and why Optane DCPMM are now trickling down second-hand channels at not-so-eye-watering prices?
 
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etorix

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Sep 28, 2021
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NablaSquaredG said:
This is not correct. AppDirect mode is supported too. ASRock Rack is just using the reference implementation (as everyone else)
Click to expand...
Thanks for the information. Then let's say that AsRock Rack does a terrible job of advertising; for instance
Capture d’écran 2022-02-07 à 08.24.11.png
It's hard not to read this as "in memory mode ONLY".
 
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NablaSquaredG

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Aug 17, 2020
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Yeah, ASRock is a mess. They don't know what their boards are capable of (well, the R&D probably does, but not the rest)

When I contacted ASRock support about DCPMM stuff, they sent me an unsupported configuration (which I know WILL NOT work) and told me to replace my supported (and now working) configuration with that.

What really got me was " I do not have these modules so I cannot test it and give you an conclusive answer" - DUDE you're the ASRock Support, how can you NOT have Optane modules at hand???
 
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technovelist

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Dec 26, 2021
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NablaSquaredG said:
Yeah, ASRock is a mess. They don't know what their boards are capable of (well, the R&D probably does, but not the rest)

When I contacted ASRock support about DCPMM stuff, they sent me an unsupported configuration (which I know WILL NOT work) and told me to replace my supported (and now working) configuration with that.

What really got me was " I do not have these modules so I cannot test it and give you an conclusive answer" - DUDE you're the ASRock Support, how can you NOT have Optane modules at hand???
Click to expand...
In my experience it's very common for people who should know about Optane modules not to know anything about them.
Intel seems to have the worst marketing when it comes to this technology that should be setting the world on fire (not literally I hope) but is basically unknown to almost everyone.
This situation is so bad that even their distributors don't know how many modules they are selling you when they are listed as coming in multiples of 4. I've had to send back single modules from THREE DIFFERENT vendors that were advertised as 4-packs.
 
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etorix

Member
Sep 28, 2021
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Well, well… I suppose that the many users who have been prevented from knowing about PMem100 will not complain that their expensive modules for 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable no longer work with 3rd Gen Scalable, not even with the lowly Silver 4314 that is limited to 2666 MHz anyway, so there's a plus side to bad marketing.
Whether there will be a PMem 300 generation after all that is another matter.
www.tomshardware.com

Intel's Optane Business Haemorrhaged Over Half a Billion Dollars in 2020

Sales were even weaker in 2021. Calculations suggest another $500 million loss occured.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com
In retrospect, Intel possibly killed Optane by trying to selling it to the masses as a caching layer for HDDs, where it failed to catch but got a bad image that cannot be shaken off.
 
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technovelist

New Member
Dec 26, 2021
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etorix said:
Well, well… I suppose that the many users who have been prevented from knowing about PMem100 will not complain that their expensive modules for 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable no longer work with 3rd Gen Scalable, not even with the lowly Silver 4314 that is limited to 2666 MHz anyway, so there's a plus side to bad marketing.
Whether there will be a PMem 300 generation after all that is another matter.
www.tomshardware.com

Intel's Optane Business Haemorrhaged Over Half a Billion Dollars in 2020

Sales were even weaker in 2021. Calculations suggest another $500 million loss occured.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com
In retrospect, Intel possibly killed Optane by trying to selling it to the masses as a caching layer for HDDs, where it failed to catch but got a bad image that cannot be shaken off.
Click to expand...
At this point I doubt there will be a pmem 300 generation because Intel has been working on CXL instead, which in case you haven't heard about it is an industry-standard way of connecting storage including 3D xpoint and other storage class memory devices rather than Intel-only.

I don't actually think the "Optane memory" products are what sank Optane pmem. My opinion is that they sank it by not having the "killer app" that would have made it attractive enough for people to spend a lot of time to rewrite code to use a new storage paradigm.

The technological advantages of Optane pmem are staggering when it is used correctly but that is a lot of work that most people won't do absent a big market for the resulting code, and there isn't a market because there is no widespread adoption.

This is a big hurdle that my company has tried to mitigate by spending 5000 engineering hours to develop easy-to-use and highly performant code that shows off Optane pmem. Right now we're looking for customers who need microsecond-level access to variable-length records in a hash table that can contain billions of records. So far we have some nibbles but no solid bites.
 
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