[eBay] $100 offer accepted Intel Optane PMEM 200 512GB PC4-3200 NMB1XXD512GPS

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gb00s

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Jul 25, 2018
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zachj said:
Unless you already have an ice lake Xeon system I think optane pmem200 is a bad way to spend money; it’s only compatible with ice lake Xeon so buying into the entire platform when it’s already three generations old seems quite silly.

The 100 gen is cheaper. Cascade lake processors and motherboards are cheaper. Ice lake isn’t all that much faster than cascade lake in most metrics.
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I have customers with Ice Lake and they are sucking in 2nd Gen Optane PMEM now because it's way cheaper than 1st Gen. That's why these do not stay long at 'SALE' everywhere. And real Ice Lake market is much cheaper than what you see on eBay or XYZ.

Koop said:
The main argument I think would be made here is that if you want a PCIe 4 platform you are better served by EPYC and it's many additional lanes. Of course you then lose out on PMEM. Maybe a bit of an apple/oranges argument. Not sure what would end up being the higher cost overall. Ultimately whatever you can find a deal on I guess.
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Get 8x 32GB 3200Mhz NVDIMM-N's on your board and put 2x DC NVME's behind them. NVDIMM-N's are cheap now. It's a little bit more expansive but performance is also a different level.
 
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wardtj

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zachj said:
The internet disagrees with you. There’s a supermicro opt and configuration guide PDF that shows in detail how to configure memory mode for pmem200. Technically it’s still configured in app direct mode but you can still specify 100% allocation to memory mode and the host will report the entire installed pmem capacity as its memory capacity after reboot.
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Do you have the link?

When I was researching the optane dims this came up as a problem since appdirect was not the mode I needed. The supermicro docs I read clearly said pmem wasnt supported. The BIOS did not have a pmem.mode. Maybe it was the board I was looking at. Again would be good to get links to the doc. THX!
 
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chrgrose

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Jul 18, 2018
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gb00s said:
I have customers with Ice Lake and they are sucking in 2nd Gen Optane PMEM now because it's way cheaper than 1st Gen. That's why these do not stay long at 'SALE' everywhere. And real Ice Lake market is much cheaper than what you see on eBay or XYZ.
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How do you access this underground Ice Lake market?
 
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chrgrose

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mtg said:
I'm planning to test that out soon (~1 week probably, waiting on a 4198 cpu)!

It might be limited to whatever 7.45GB/s comes out to in Tokens per second, or somewhere between the weighted average of the actual DDR4 + the Optane stick, unless the CPU is clever enough to be rotating weights through the pmem before and after they are actually needed. Which it almost 100% is not.

One specific thing it would be very good at is a very, very large embedding model, which is just a sparse lookup. So you have a massive table but only grab 4KB of that at a time. Recommender models like DLRM come into this category as well, I think.
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I had a client have me build an R940 and T7920 with 12TB and 6TB, respectively, apparently for this purpose. So I'll probably hear about the efficacy of such a configuration soon. I would imagine that a large memory based models could perform in theory but I've also heard that the existing codes are not very parallel or NUMA aware.
 
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Cruzader

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chrgrose said:
How do you access this underground Ice Lake market?
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Its not as much underground as much as its going to the brokers/recyclers instead of the middleman reselling them towards the consumer market.
But even the ebay resellers will give you completely different pricing if you are getting multiple, as they do have solid margins making it worth selling single cpus to begin with.
 
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zachj

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jpmomo

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wardtj said:
Yes. 200 and 300 will not do straight pmem. There's some updated docs that talk about it. You can do appdirect and storage modes, hence mm but not pmem.
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I have both the 200 and 300 series running in mm. The 300 series required a special bios and on only 1 of my mb. (Gigabyte).
I have the 200 series running on several MB/servers with no issues. The ice lake gen for me was a big leap ahead. Mainly because I need high speed networking and PCI gen 4 helped with that.
 
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jpmomo

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Koop said:
I totally agree. It was actually a nightmare. Seemed like 1 out of 4 did not work for some reason. That was only after troubleshooting for hours on my end making sure I wasn't the one at fault with other parts or my config as I was totally (and still am tbh) new to using PMEM.

And then in TrueNAS the modules did not shop up with serials? I was very sad lol still never really figured that out. I wanted to use a few modules a group of them for a metadata special vdev.



The main argument I think would be made here is that if you want a PCIe 4 platform you are better served by EPYC and it's many additional lanes. Of course you then lose out on PMEM. Maybe a bit of an apple/oranges argument. Not sure what would end up being the higher cost overall. Ultimately whatever you can find a deal on I guess.

My next question would be PMEM 100 vs 200 just comparing side by side- is it really much of a difference? Of course 200 series can run much faster but how does that translate to disk performance when in app direct mode for example? I would assume 'really good' but I'm not sure actually.

Oddly, for me, I have more PMEM 300 series modules vs 200. Just what I happened across with used hardware locally (I wasn't kidding earlier about local ewaste).
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Let me know if you still have access to the pmem 300 series as I do have a MB that actually supports them in mm. I would be interested in the 256gb or 512gb versions.
 
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jpmomo

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miraculix said:
For anyone interested in buying from this seller but worried about questionable/defective sticks, mine arrived in the original retail packaging, exactly as shown in the listing but still sealed by the sticker. I probably won't be able to install and test them until next weekend but so far so good...
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Let me know which seller has any reliable pmem 200 or 300 series ideally on 512gb sizes.
 
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mtg

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jpmomo said:
Do you have a link as the one at the beginning of this thread came back with 600 for 4 not the 100 for 4 that I offered:)
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I got the last 4 from the seller I used; sadly they have not listed any more.
 
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foureight84

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Are these backward compatible? 200 and 300 series work with 2nd gen Cascade Lake or are they locked to respective generation processors?

EDIT: NVM. Doesn't seem like Cascade Lake can take Optane 200.
 
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mtg

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foureight84 said:
Are these backward compatible? 200 and 300 series work with 2nd gen Cascade Lake or are they locked to respective generation processors?

EDIT: NVM. Doesn't seem like Cascade Lake can take Optane 200.
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Yeah, each gen is locked to it’s respective platform (300 is DDR5, so that physically will not work in cascade lake).
 
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jpmomo

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100 series only worked with certain SKUs and within same generation. 200 works with most ice lake SKUs and supports memory mode and app direct mode. 300 series is the unicorn and supports mostly app direct but I was able to get it to support mm on only 1 motherboard with special bios. I have not found anyone else that has the 300 series working in mm or app direct for that matter. I would be interested in hearing from anyone that has the 300 series working in either mode. It would be helpful to trade notes and if any knows where I can find the 300 series in 256g or 512g sizes.
 
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gb00s

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You would need at least 2x X11DPU to be able to use all them :rolleyes: I have several X11DPU servers fully populated with 12x 128GB each in mixed mode. But then you would need at least 32GB usual DDR4 ram sticks against it to keep the recommended 4:1 ratio.
 
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jpmomo

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gb00s said:
You would need at least 2x X11DPU to be able to use all them :rolleyes: I have several X11DPU servers fully populated with 12x 128GB each in mixed mode. But then you would need at least 32GB usual DDR4 ram sticks against it to keep the recommended 4:1 ratio.
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the 100 series is probably not worth it unless you have compatible cpus skus and don't mind having an older system. you should at least be looking for the 512G sizes for the 100 series as they are pretty cheap now.
The 200 series is the series to get as they work with most of that gen intel cpus and can also be found relatively cheap. All of this is within the context of running in MM (memory mode, similar to normal ram) vs App direct which requires apps to be optane aware.
The 300 series is mostly worthless if you are trying to use in mm as there are not many mb/bios combos that support it.
I have only found 1 mb and that needed a custom bios for the 300 series to work in mm. There might be others but I have not found or gotten confirmation of any.
 
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