IMO if Intel really really wanted Optane to sell as much as possible they (Intel) need to stop cutting features away to only make available to certain SKU often regardless of the price of such SKU.
I can understand the need for a product stack and reservation of some features as exclusive (limiting certain things to Xeon platforms for instance to keep someone's i3 out of a server rack, to use an extreme example), but pushing Optane support downward makes a lot of sense. Lower priced systems are more likely to depend on mechanical hard drives so holding back the capability from those systems struck me as a poor move.
I was always baffled by Intel's restrictions on optane. Especially in it's initial boot-drive only form it only made sense on budget systems with a sole mechanical HDD, but budget systems were locked out, bizarre...
Strategically Intel believes they absolutely need to segment their market to continually increase there profits. This has bitten them in the past, particularly in ultra mobile, where they simply don't understand that at times market share is more important than selling price. Optane is a good technology but it would never catch on with it carrying both a price premium for the parts and the higher hardware requirements. Not only do I agree with the sentiment of stupid market segmentation on Intel's behalf, this is something they should have done from the very beginning.
Now only if we could get ECC throughout the Core i3/i5/i7/i9 line up...
Intel has always put new functionality into upper lines like Xeon and then move them down to lower lines. They did this with Hyperthreading and of course AVX-512
Not always. Centrino, or an integrated memory controller, or even hyper-threads 2nd edition, moved downmarket fairly fast.
I think it's the new finance-minded (and much less interesting and slower moving...) Intel of the last ten years or so that has really taken this to extremes. Not understanding how computer ecosystems really work, they've basically destroyed the potential of all the new instructions being added because of weak eco-system support. (This management lack of support for creating broad eco-systems is one reason I'm not optimistic about Intel's multi-directional scramble into NPU/TPU/GPUs...)
Don’t get the point of this. Optane is too expensive. With the drop in SSD prices, with what you pay for optane, you could add a 256 go to 512 fab SSD which would be way better.
I think Optane was use as test bed on higher end products - moving the product to lower lines means that Intel will drop prices likely because of new technology since Micron is no longer involved
Please look at the date on original source article - it date 2/20/2019 so the answer to that question is NO.
A real April foods article about Intel, would be that Intel decided to give up Optane memory and let Micron take over it. Or the entire Xe line is April fools and Intel decided to use AMD Graphics instead.
Optane cache is a pretty pointless product based on current pricing. You can get a much larger NVMe SSD to use as a single drive. A 256GB SSD is about the same price as an 32GB Optane module. If you include the price of the hard drive you might as well just get a 1TB NVMe SSD.
This is exactly what I'm doing. Cheap SATA SSD + 32GB Optane. It's stupid fast. Plus they've added file pinning so you can force files to stay on the cache.
Does Intel even make Pentiums/Celerons anymore? With the current shortages I'd assume they would stamp all the "small die" cores as i3 and charge accordingly. Presumably they are under contract to produce a certain number for Dell and HP, so allowing these users to use Optane shouldn't change Intel's sales at all (assuming that such OEM computers even allow M2 upgrades).
If they don't, they'd either have to lower i3 pricing or lose the market to AMD. Pricing theory dictates a product at every reasonable price point to maximise value extraction.
Back when memory was expensive, a lot of OEMs would stick in a small (probably 16G) optane drive on a Pentium/Celery/i3 with 4G of memory and map the optane as virtual memory. It worked about 80% as well as "real memory" (and presumably would work a lot better with 64B cachelines instead of having to swap 4k pages).
With today's memory prices that's pretty pointless. And the 32G drives are harder to find/more expensive if you had bigger jobs and wanted 16-32G RAM and a 32G-64G optane swap.
That's probably the windows defender real time protection, it does a very good job of making fast storage devices completely pointless to own if you use Windows.
That seems unusual to say the least. I haven't seen CPU demand increase drastically with disk activity in a very long time, not since IDE hard drives with their big gray ribbon cables were your only choice for storage, at any rate.
My bad. This announcement seems limited to desktop systems which certainly has more performance than a 15w mobile chip. "Intel recently expanded support for its Optane Memory caching SSDs to Celeron and Pentium-based desktop systems."
Good job Intel, now the people who can't afford high-end CPUs also won't be able to afford Optane memory to go with them!
Seriously though, Optane was always a high-end product for people who already have an SSD and want to make it go Even Faster. For people running Celerons and Pentiums, going from a HDD to a 128GB SSD will be more useful - and probably cheaper - than plumping on 32GB of Optane.
And even if Optane would be faster, there's another consideration: the price of low-capacity *NVMe* drives has fallen drastically. Case in point, the Megacorp that I work for now buys the exact same NVMe-equipped PC configurations from Dell, because it's cheaper (in terms of time = money) and easier to have a bunch of machines with identical motherboards for imaging and swap-out purposes, than it is to have a mishmash of SATA and NVMe drives. That means that even the lowliest plebs get a 128GB NVMe drive - sure it's a crappy Toshiba or Liteon, but its sequential speeds are still higher than Optane's.
Possible fit for the Optane/QLC combo m.2 stick they've announced--try to make a lower-end Flash SSD compete with more expensive ones through caching. To be seen if it takes off; one "problem" is other lower-end NVMe SSDs getting cheaper/better over time as well.
I'm pretty sure you can just use tiny Optane devices as a cache already under Linux with bcache so Intel's explicit support was never necessary to begin with on non-Windows NAS devices and this latest driver update doesn't alter that landscape.
"ever a prerogative of premium PCs is up to debate (they are in case of Apple's iMac AIOs)"
Insofar as you consider the Mac mini a non-premium PC (it kinda sorta was until the upgrade this year) this is not quite true. The mini was also available with Fusion drive, that was not a purely iMac feature.
(It's also possible to construct your own fusion drive on any Mac from whatever combination of built-in or external SSD and HD you like. You can use this to retrofit Fusion onto older machines that came out pre-Fusion. I did this with my older Macs before some died and others could be upgraded to all SSD. https://www.macworld.com/article/2014011/how-to-ma...
I don't know enough about how Intel/Windows does things to know the extent to which you could do the same sort of aftermarket retrofit on a non-high-end PC.)
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Dragonstongue - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
IMO if Intel really really wanted Optane to sell as much as possible they (Intel) need to stop cutting features away to only make available to certain SKU often regardless of the price of such SKU.PeachNCream - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
I can understand the need for a product stack and reservation of some features as exclusive (limiting certain things to Xeon platforms for instance to keep someone's i3 out of a server rack, to use an extreme example), but pushing Optane support downward makes a lot of sense. Lower priced systems are more likely to depend on mechanical hard drives so holding back the capability from those systems struck me as a poor move.failquail - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Indeed.I was always baffled by Intel's restrictions on optane. Especially in it's initial boot-drive only form it only made sense on budget systems with a sole mechanical HDD, but budget systems were locked out, bizarre...
Kevin G - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Strategically Intel believes they absolutely need to segment their market to continually increase there profits. This has bitten them in the past, particularly in ultra mobile, where they simply don't understand that at times market share is more important than selling price. Optane is a good technology but it would never catch on with it carrying both a price premium for the parts and the higher hardware requirements. Not only do I agree with the sentiment of stupid market segmentation on Intel's behalf, this is something they should have done from the very beginning.Now only if we could get ECC throughout the Core i3/i5/i7/i9 line up...
HStewart - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Intel has always put new functionality into upper lines like Xeon and then move them down to lower lines. They did this with Hyperthreading and of course AVX-512name99 - Tuesday, April 2, 2019 - link
Not always. Centrino, or an integrated memory controller, or even hyper-threads 2nd edition, moved downmarket fairly fast.I think it's the new finance-minded (and much less interesting and slower moving...) Intel of the last ten years or so that has really taken this to extremes. Not understanding how computer ecosystems really work, they've basically destroyed the potential of all the new instructions being added because of weak eco-system support.
(This management lack of support for creating broad eco-systems is one reason I'm not optimistic about Intel's multi-directional scramble into NPU/TPU/GPUs...)
citan x - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Don’t get the point of this. Optane is too expensive. With the drop in SSD prices, with what you pay for optane, you could add a 256 go to 512 fab SSD which would be way better.HStewart - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
I think Optane was use as test bed on higher end products - moving the product to lower lines means that Intel will drop prices likely because of new technology since Micron is no longer involvedIrata - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
That's the April fools' article, right ?HStewart - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Please look at the date on original source article - it date 2/20/2019 so the answer to that question is NO.A real April foods article about Intel, would be that Intel decided to give up Optane memory and let Micron take over it. Or the entire Xe line is April fools and Intel decided to use AMD Graphics instead.
Flunk - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Optane cache is a pretty pointless product based on current pricing. You can get a much larger NVMe SSD to use as a single drive. A 256GB SSD is about the same price as an 32GB Optane module. If you include the price of the hard drive you might as well just get a 1TB NVMe SSD.dullard - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
The point is to get a fast SSD and pair it with an even faster Optane. Why be stuck with a much slower 1 TB SSD?dcianf - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
This is exactly what I'm doing. Cheap SATA SSD + 32GB Optane. It's stupid fast. Plus they've added file pinning so you can force files to stay on the cache.wumpus - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Does Intel even make Pentiums/Celerons anymore? With the current shortages I'd assume they would stamp all the "small die" cores as i3 and charge accordingly. Presumably they are under contract to produce a certain number for Dell and HP, so allowing these users to use Optane shouldn't change Intel's sales at all (assuming that such OEM computers even allow M2 upgrades).GreenReaper - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
If they don't, they'd either have to lower i3 pricing or lose the market to AMD. Pricing theory dictates a product at every reasonable price point to maximise value extraction.Vitor - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Why anyone that can afford Optane would be stuck to such bad CPUs?PrayForDeath - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
The small 32GB optane drives are pretty cheap, and can greatly improve the performance of slow PCs with mechanical driveswumpus - Tuesday, April 2, 2019 - link
Back when memory was expensive, a lot of OEMs would stick in a small (probably 16G) optane drive on a Pentium/Celery/i3 with 4G of memory and map the optane as virtual memory. It worked about 80% as well as "real memory" (and presumably would work a lot better with 64B cachelines instead of having to swap 4k pages).With today's memory prices that's pretty pointless. And the 32G drives are harder to find/more expensive if you had bigger jobs and wanted 16-32G RAM and a 32G-64G optane swap.
zodiacfml - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
The CPUs will be a bottleneck. I have an i3 dual core laptop with a disk, CPU load shoots up for any intensive disk activity except a copy.notashill - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
That's probably the windows defender real time protection, it does a very good job of making fast storage devices completely pointless to own if you use Windows.PeachNCream - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
That seems unusual to say the least. I haven't seen CPU demand increase drastically with disk activity in a very long time, not since IDE hard drives with their big gray ribbon cables were your only choice for storage, at any rate.zodiacfml - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
My bad. This announcement seems limited to desktop systems which certainly has more performance than a 15w mobile chip."Intel recently expanded support for its Optane Memory caching SSDs to Celeron and Pentium-based desktop systems."
HStewart - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
This is not April Fools joke - please look at original article - it has date of 2/20/2019 on it.The_Assimilator - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Good job Intel, now the people who can't afford high-end CPUs also won't be able to afford Optane memory to go with them!Seriously though, Optane was always a high-end product for people who already have an SSD and want to make it go Even Faster. For people running Celerons and Pentiums, going from a HDD to a 128GB SSD will be more useful - and probably cheaper - than plumping on 32GB of Optane.
And even if Optane would be faster, there's another consideration: the price of low-capacity *NVMe* drives has fallen drastically. Case in point, the Megacorp that I work for now buys the exact same NVMe-equipped PC configurations from Dell, because it's cheaper (in terms of time = money) and easier to have a bunch of machines with identical motherboards for imaging and swap-out purposes, than it is to have a mishmash of SATA and NVMe drives. That means that even the lowliest plebs get a 128GB NVMe drive - sure it's a crappy Toshiba or Liteon, but its sequential speeds are still higher than Optane's.
twotwotwo - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Possible fit for the Optane/QLC combo m.2 stick they've announced--try to make a lower-end Flash SSD compete with more expensive ones through caching. To be seen if it takes off; one "problem" is other lower-end NVMe SSDs getting cheaper/better over time as well.zepi - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
I could easily see this being quite nice for nas-platforms.Nice write-through cache for HDD-NAS can really make a difference, especially for NAS manufacturer that includes 10GbE ports.
Billy Tallis - Monday, April 1, 2019 - link
Who runs Windows on their NAS?GreenReaper - Tuesday, April 2, 2019 - link
It was more popular when Windows Home Server was actually a thing; I think that's one reason Home Server Show forums was so popular.PeachNCream - Tuesday, April 2, 2019 - link
I'm pretty sure you can just use tiny Optane devices as a cache already under Linux with bcache so Intel's explicit support was never necessary to begin with on non-Windows NAS devices and this latest driver update doesn't alter that landscape.name99 - Tuesday, April 2, 2019 - link
"ever a prerogative of premium PCs is up to debate (they are in case of Apple's iMac AIOs)"Insofar as you consider the Mac mini a non-premium PC (it kinda sorta was until the upgrade this year) this is not quite true. The mini was also available with Fusion drive, that was not a purely iMac feature.
(It's also possible to construct your own fusion drive on any Mac from whatever combination of built-in or external SSD and HD you like. You can use this to retrofit Fusion onto older machines that came out pre-Fusion. I did this with my older Macs before some died and others could be upgraded to all SSD.
https://www.macworld.com/article/2014011/how-to-ma...
I don't know enough about how Intel/Windows does things to know the extent to which you could do the same sort of aftermarket retrofit on a non-high-end PC.)