The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X (375GB) Review: Testing 3D XPoint Performance
by Billy Tallis on April 20, 2017 12:00 PM ESTFinal Words: Is 3D XPoint Ready?
The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X is a very high-performing enterprise SSD, but more importantly it is the first shipping product using Intel's 3D XPoint memory technology. After a year and a half of talking up 3D XPoint, Intel has finally shipped something. The P4800X proves that 3D XPoint memory is real and that it really works. The P4800X is just a first-generation product, but it's more than sufficient to establish 3D XPoint memory as a serious contender in the storage market.
If your workload matches its strengths, the P4800X offers performance that cannot currently be provided by any other storage product. This means high throughput random access, as well as very strict latency requirements - the results Optane achieves for it's quality of service for latency on both reads and writes, especially in heavy environments with a mixed read/write workload, is a significant margin ahead of anything available on the market.
At 50/50 reads/writes, latency QoS for the DC P4800X is 30x better than the competition
The Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X is not the fastest SSD ever on every single test. It's based on a revolutionary technology, but no matter how high expectations were, very rarely does a first-generation product take over the world unless it becomes ubiquitous and cheap on day one. The Optane SSD is ultimately an expensive niche product. If you don't need high throughput random access with the strictest latency requirements, the Optane SSD DC P4800X may not be the best choice. It is very expensive compared to most flash-based SSDs.
With the Optane SSD and 3D XPoint memory now clearly established as useful and usable, the big question is how broad its appeal will be. The originally announcements around Optane promised a lot, and this initial product delivers a few of those metrics, so to some extent, the P4800X may have to grow its own market and reteach partners what Optane is capable of today. Working with developers and partners is going to be key here - they have to perform outreach and entice software developers to write applications that rely on extremely fast storage. That being said, there are plenty of market segments already that can never get enough storage performance, so anything above what is available in the market today will be more than welcome.
There's still much more we would like to know about the Optane SSD and the 3D XPoint memory it contains. Since our testing was remote, we have not yet even had the chance to look under the drives's heatsink, or measure the power efficiency of the Optane SSD and compare it against other SSDs. We are awaiting an opportunity to get a drive in hand, and expect some of the secrets under the hood to be exposed in due course as drives filter through the ecosystem.
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ddriver - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
Then those reviews would show minuscule benefit of nvme and hypetane over a regular old ssd.DrunkenDonkey - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
NVME yes, will show up that when you run that game on 960 pro it will take exactly same amount (-~1 sec) compared to old sata ssd. Octane however will show some 8 times faster and it will stick totally awesome in the graph. If you don't know what to look for, octane is not impressive and some new nvme ssd is actually very good compared to the old, both are untrue.ianmills - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
Loving how the "vertical axis units" were added after the graph for clarity. Great attention to detail Billy!serendip - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
How about power consumption? Could we start seeing similar hardware in tablets and phones in say, 5 years' time? We will still need DRAM for speed and low power consumption. XPoint would then make for a great system and caching drive, with slower and cheaper NAND being used for media storage, like how SSD + HDD setups are used now.Ian Cutress - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
Literally the last two sentences in the review (and mentioned at other times):"Since our testing was remote, we have not yet even had the chance to look under the drives's heatsink, or measure the power efficiency of the Optane SSD and compare it against other SSDs. We are awaiting an opportunity to get a drive in hand, and expect some of the secrets under the hood to be exposed in due course as drives filter through the ecosystem."
random2 - Thursday, April 20, 2017 - link
"so it is interesting to see where Intel is going to lay down its line in the sand."Mixed metaphor; "lay down your cards" or "draw a line in the sand"
iwod - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
What I really want to see, ( Not sure if Intel allows them to )Optane to put through all the test of SSD Bench. ( For Reference Only, and we would know how QD1 affect the benchmarks )
And Power Consumption.
ddriver - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
( Not sure if Intel allows them to )Most likely the review guidelines intel mandated for this are longer than the actual review ;)
Pork@III - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
$1520 for only 375GB...we not live in 2012. We live in 2017! If not to lie myself?tuxRoller - Friday, April 21, 2017 - link
"However it is worth noting that the Optane SSD only manages a passing score when the application uses asynchronous I/O APIs. Using simple synchronous write() system calls pushes the average latency up to 11-12µs"You mentioned "polling mode" for nvme was disabled, which is strange since that's been the default since ~4.5. Also, there are different types of polling modes, so, my hope is that the polling mode you are talking about is the new hybrid polling (introduced in 4.10, but possibly backported to your Ubuntu kernel). If not, then we know that xpoint is faster than the data you've gathered. Western Digital gave a talk at the recent Vault conference and discussed when it makes sense to poll vs reap.
Polling ends up being about 1.3x faster (average latency) than waiting for the irq (4.5us vs 6us). If you went with one of the userspace drivers, polling ends up twice as fast, but that would take much more work to benchmark.
So, considering that you're benchmarking the kinds of devices that this feature was designed for, and that we are interested in us latencies, what you've ended up benchmarking here was, to a greater extent than needed, the default kernel configuration.
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