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by touisteur 1032 days ago
I can see many reasons why Optane PDIMMs didn't take off, other than not being cloud-available (which Intel might have subsidized with the help of a big software player and a series of killer apps). Price was excruciating, number of write cycles (so lifetime of machine, architecture) not very clear and upgrade path / exit hatch was also not clear. Also the programming model wasn't very clear and not many big important applications had migrated to use them efficiently or in an interesting manner (we were still in the 'crazy interesting papers' cycle).

It still grates me that the only interface we ended up with for high speed durable data is nvme through pcie and regret the lost promise of fast byte-addressable persistent memory, but once again, worse is better seems to have won?
2 comments
wtallis 1032 days ago
> number of write cycles (so lifetime of machine, architecture) not very clear

I thought Intel was pretty clear by saying they warranted the modules for five years of continuous operation regardless of workload.

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CHY872 1032 days ago
right - why won't 'networking w/ 800GbE' be different (in terms of weird programming model, crazy interesting papers, etc)?
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touisteur 1031 days ago
Very good question. Being up to my eyeballs on 400G, dpdk, gpudirect, spdk right now I see a way forward, but also I don't see how we 'progress' more without them, where's the 'other' path? Integrated chips and like Apple's m1/2 or NVIDIA's GH and AMD's MI300X?
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