You have to admit that Intel is pretty much teeing it up for ddriver. I'm sure they had leaked info that the next day AMD would be announcing a new SSD caching feature. Have to penalize anyone and additional $40 for buying Intel.
They aren't really expecting anyone buying an i5 not to have an SSD? Right? I mean, maybe a pentium, or maybe even an i3, but not an i5. This has "fanboy penalty" written all over it.
Maybe the 470 will suck, but I can't imagine wanting this bundle in a new build. And I'm a big fan of HDDs and would probably enable the feature in a 470 (assuming I could limit it to a specific [old] SSD, or ideally part of an SSD).
I'm really not defending Intel here or elsewhere. But broken logic should be called out and ddriver started with the idea that all things 3DXPoint/Optane are 'bad' because "evil Intel" so all roads lead to that conclusion for him.
I have no clue if there is a use for this bundle, for me I don't see it. Perhaps laptop manufacturers will find a use, or OEM's trying to shave a few pennies off while keeping significant storage (HDD vs SSD). Got me. I just know that ddriver isn't analyzing this on its merits, he sees "Intel" in an article title and his posts write themselves.
Still no mention of StoreMI in the ryzen+ review. It has its own section and everything, but is one of those "to be named later" parts. And while Anandtech has its own "insert [words] here" notes, I'm not sure AMD has even shipped released StoreMI code (it was said to have shipped within this week).
Also note that Anandtech doesn't have any 470 motherboards on the list for testing. This must be an extremely low-priority feature (which doesn't say much for this "deal" from Intel, either).
"The Optane software can now cache data from any HDD" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- I would think caching boot files and most used apps on boot drive would be preferred to caching whatever/wherever
A motherboard that can handle an optane cache drive would be better served using an optane boot drive
secondary game drive should be SSD
Cold storage hard drives would never be used enough to need an optane cache
It seems like Intel is wasting their cache drives on unused data
Not necessarily. There are certainly use cases where people have a relatively small SSD to run the OS and a bigger HDD for bulk storage, possibly even games or other programs. I'm all flash now, but I had such a setup for a few years when I couldn't afford bigger SSDs. You already have most of the benefit of having your OS on an SSD, but now you can accelerate the majority of your storage at a time as well.
It can't be used as the boot drive, but it CAN be used to ACCELERATE or CACHE the boot drive. Up until now, it's only been available for that, and I have come acrossed it once or twice in the wild, it does a surprisingly good job, but I thought it was disappointing that I couldn't use it for clients who already had an SSD for the boot drive, but had a secondary storage drive that was often accessed that I couldn't use it for. Now I can. I would still prefer an 850/950 Evo for most clients, but in the case where that isn't in the budget, and their system happened to be a 7th or 8th Gen Intel, I would definitely consider it. I don't know if these bundles will be particularly helpful, but time will tell I guess. Of course for my own systems it will be hard to use these, Ryzen is not compatible obviously...
All Optane drives (m.2 or PCIe or u.2) present themselves as any other NAND-based NVME SSD, and can be used as such on any platform that supports that. You only get the caching feature with an Intel chipset, but if you wanted you could put an Optane 'cache' drive and boot Linux off of it on a Ryzen platform, and it would work just fine.
Huh. Better stop booting from my 1 TB optane drive then...
Not sure why you included such a high statistical probability for something you obviously didn't fact check at all. Maybe you meant you can't boot from the integrated ones? You still seem very sure of something that you provide no evidence for.
I still have my game son some crappy 5400 rpm drives and I don't care much. Optane would not help here because it's too small, could cache barley 2 games.
So where this differs from SSHD's and previous implementations like ReadyBoost isn't just that the capacity is larger (although some readyboost SSD's were more than 16GB) but that it is not SATA-limited. Having burst cache rated at 2000-3000MB/sec, opposed to SSHD's and ReadyBoost drives that have theoretical limits around 500MB/sec but in reality are 200MB-300MB/sec (making their only real advantage over a HDD reduced latency since most HDD's can transfer 200MB/sec sustained now.)
Optane is a multi-niche application.
One niche will be boosting HDD performance in low-end PC's, where the value proposition is limited because after the cost of an HDD and a high capacity Optane (32GB) you can probably buy a 500GB SSD. The only reason you would use Optane in this application is if you need mass storage on a budget with better than HDD performance. Most people just don't need that much storage, though.
The second niche market is the HPC market where cost is no issue, and people will buy 480GB Optane drives for $600 bucks, hard to justify for most people (even the HPC crowd) when NVMe drives are for the most part nearly as fast as Optane drives.
Unfortunately for Intel, the only credible benefit for the non-volatile nature of Optane is the caching aspect. This has no real-world benefit to an SSD. The way block management and the indirection table works in Optane obviously reduced latency but that is a non-issue for desktop applications, especially gaming where the data is large sustained chunks loaded in a single burst.
The last, obvious niche for Optane is enterprise, and this is where it will probably have the most success (as far as profitability) because the durability and low latency.
If you do serious photo or video editing, it absolutely could help with that, even if it was just keeping the editor in cach so you don't have to wait for a hdd lookup each time you use a program feature
I think you are wildly overestimating how much memory a photo can take up (gigapixels? really?). Video is of course another story, and you could always user more memory, but is 16G really enough to make a difference (I'm guessing yes, but you still want to pop for 32G or more).
Considering this is a CPU bundle (and thus starting a build), for video editing I would certainly start with Ryzen, and try to move as much to SSD as possible (and especially find out if the 470 could make my life easier and preferably using a PCIe SSD as cache.
You would be surprised how many first time clients I get, that don't have even have an SSD for a boot drive. It's almost always the first thing I do with a new client, is get them purchase enough 850/950 Evos for every Workstation in their business, and allow me to migrate the systems over, and they ALWAYS have the same surprised reaction, they will never go back to traditional spinning rust.
It's easy for us in the enthusiast market to wonder how not everybody has converted by now, but trust me, there is a whole world of small to midsize businesses out there, that haven't even heard of SSDs, and have no CTO or IT department to advise them, and then to think, all their employees that work on these slow systems who go home and probably have systems just as slow because they also don't know about SSDs, trust me, they are out there.
Even in the world of SSD's there are fast ones and slow ones, and this is decidely fast.
It's also a nice intermediate to a full system on a chip, taken with other developments like the the high end GPU integration that they are doing with AMD. This chip may seem like the target audience is limited, but if the next step is a package with 64 or 128 GB ssd, integrated ram and a high end gpu, all on a single chip, every ultralight laptop maker in the world will want that.
I have a 1TB 5400RPM hard drive in one of my laptops because I needed the storage space and didn't want to tote around an external drive. It runs Linux so it's not as painful as Windows on boot up or when loading programs, but I am thinking about picking up a similar size SSD. Then again, it's a seven year old laptop so I'm loathe to throw money at storage far in excess of the computer's current value.
Traditionally, there was a saying "the steady state of a hard drive is full". These days, plenty of people simply don't fill up more than 100G of space (obviously neither gamers nor other heavy computer users), and thus don't need rotating rust. For everybody else, $50-70 for a few terabytes is a godsend, and simply a required item in any build.
Of course, once you start collecting a few of these there is the obvious question of leaving them in your PC or adding a NAS. Single users (or only heavy user in a family) can obviously get away with leaving them in a PC, but others will want the NAS (if only for media storage).
There's also the issue of windows occasionally simply *has* to spin every drive it has. That is annoying. I don't think I've seen this in Linux even though Linus has been quoted in the "all rotating rust belongs in a NAS" camp (the actual quote was more about "PCs should be all SSD").
Personally, I'd be much more interested in AMD's 470 board and simply using a chunk of a SSD. If Intel is serious about doing this with optane, they need to imbed the stuff in the motherboard/south bridge and cache SSDs. Very few people who are willing to pay for 16G of cache want it on their HDD.
I'm not really very interested in Optane as a drive cache at this point. Using any SSD, even a budget TLC drive, will give the person at the keyboard a system that's responsive enough. What I see in Optane's future are the benefits of superior endurance versus NAND so it or some later iteration of it can replace current solid state storage and integration with RAM on DIMMs for lower power operation, saving current system states, or just pairing up storage with system memory for tighter integration and smaller system. Those are exciting and interesting. Using Optane as a way to compensate for being stuck on a mechanical hard drive (I get it, there are some situations where the capacity is a necessity and the speed isn't as big of a factor) feels oddly similar to how Windows Vista's ReadyBoost was a poor alternative to getting more RAM for your computer.
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42 Comments
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YukaKun - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
Sounds like an interesting value proposition. How long is the life expectancy of the Optane drives?Cheers!
shabby - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
What value? There's no discount with this "bundle".YukaKun - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
I don't think "value" means what you think it means.But in any case, there is a discount. Minimal, but it exists.
Cheers!
iter - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
A few months from now intel might decide to put hypetane in cereal boxes... gotta push it but no one wants it.Hurr Durr - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
I wonder if youll still be mumbling about hypetane twenty years from now.Reflex - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
Came for stupid comments by ddriver/iter. Was not disappointed.wumpus - Monday, April 16, 2018 - link
You have to admit that Intel is pretty much teeing it up for ddriver. I'm sure they had leaked info that the next day AMD would be announcing a new SSD caching feature. Have to penalize anyone and additional $40 for buying Intel.They aren't really expecting anyone buying an i5 not to have an SSD? Right? I mean, maybe a pentium, or maybe even an i3, but not an i5. This has "fanboy penalty" written all over it.
Maybe the 470 will suck, but I can't imagine wanting this bundle in a new build. And I'm a big fan of HDDs and would probably enable the feature in a 470 (assuming I could limit it to a specific [old] SSD, or ideally part of an SSD).
Reflex - Tuesday, April 17, 2018 - link
I'm really not defending Intel here or elsewhere. But broken logic should be called out and ddriver started with the idea that all things 3DXPoint/Optane are 'bad' because "evil Intel" so all roads lead to that conclusion for him.I have no clue if there is a use for this bundle, for me I don't see it. Perhaps laptop manufacturers will find a use, or OEM's trying to shave a few pennies off while keeping significant storage (HDD vs SSD). Got me. I just know that ddriver isn't analyzing this on its merits, he sees "Intel" in an article title and his posts write themselves.
wumpus - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
Still no mention of StoreMI in the ryzen+ review. It has its own section and everything, but is one of those "to be named later" parts. And while Anandtech has its own "insert [words] here" notes, I'm not sure AMD has even shipped released StoreMI code (it was said to have shipped within this week).Also note that Anandtech doesn't have any 470 motherboards on the list for testing. This must be an extremely low-priority feature (which doesn't say much for this "deal" from Intel, either).
ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
"The Optane software can now cache data from any HDD"-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would think caching boot files and most used apps on boot drive would be preferred to caching whatever/wherever
A motherboard that can handle an optane cache drive would be better served using an optane boot drive
secondary game drive should be SSD
Cold storage hard drives would never be used enough to need an optane cache
It seems like Intel is wasting their cache drives on unused data
Drumsticks - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
Not necessarily. There are certainly use cases where people have a relatively small SSD to run the OS and a bigger HDD for bulk storage, possibly even games or other programs. I'm all flash now, but I had such a setup for a few years when I couldn't afford bigger SSDs. You already have most of the benefit of having your OS on an SSD, but now you can accelerate the majority of your storage at a time as well.AdmrlAhab - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
That's true, but I'm 99.9% positive that Optane drivea can't be used as boot devices.Ryan Smith - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
The small ones can't by virtue of being so small. But the larger 800p series and above can be used as boot drives.MattTheTechLV - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
It can't be used as the boot drive, but it CAN be used to ACCELERATE or CACHE the boot drive. Up until now, it's only been available for that, and I have come acrossed it once or twice in the wild, it does a surprisingly good job, but I thought it was disappointing that I couldn't use it for clients who already had an SSD for the boot drive, but had a secondary storage drive that was often accessed that I couldn't use it for. Now I can. I would still prefer an 850/950 Evo for most clients, but in the case where that isn't in the budget, and their system happened to be a 7th or 8th Gen Intel, I would definitely consider it. I don't know if these bundles will be particularly helpful, but time will tell I guess. Of course for my own systems it will be hard to use these, Ryzen is not compatible obviously...edzieba - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
All Optane drives (m.2 or PCIe or u.2) present themselves as any other NAND-based NVME SSD, and can be used as such on any platform that supports that. You only get the caching feature with an Intel chipset, but if you wanted you could put an Optane 'cache' drive and boot Linux off of it on a Ryzen platform, and it would work just fine.Phyzzi - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
Huh. Better stop booting from my 1 TB optane drive then...Not sure why you included such a high statistical probability for something you obviously didn't fact check at all. Maybe you meant you can't boot from the integrated ones? You still seem very sure of something that you provide no evidence for.
rarson - Monday, April 16, 2018 - link
1TB Optane drive, huh? Is your computer imaginary?beginner99 - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
I still have my game son some crappy 5400 rpm drives and I don't care much. Optane would not help here because it's too small, could cache barley 2 games.iter - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
Actually many modern games exceed 32 gigs. And they keep growing rapidly.In fact, over 150 of the games released the last couple of years exceed 32 gb in installer form, so they are even bigger when installed.
Hypetane as cache really makes sense on older mediocre systems with dreadfully slow mechanical storage and tiny amounts of ram.
Ironically, it is not supported on such systems. So it is a gigantic flop...
Samus - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
So where this differs from SSHD's and previous implementations like ReadyBoost isn't just that the capacity is larger (although some readyboost SSD's were more than 16GB) but that it is not SATA-limited. Having burst cache rated at 2000-3000MB/sec, opposed to SSHD's and ReadyBoost drives that have theoretical limits around 500MB/sec but in reality are 200MB-300MB/sec (making their only real advantage over a HDD reduced latency since most HDD's can transfer 200MB/sec sustained now.)Optane is a multi-niche application.
One niche will be boosting HDD performance in low-end PC's, where the value proposition is limited because after the cost of an HDD and a high capacity Optane (32GB) you can probably buy a 500GB SSD. The only reason you would use Optane in this application is if you need mass storage on a budget with better than HDD performance. Most people just don't need that much storage, though.
The second niche market is the HPC market where cost is no issue, and people will buy 480GB Optane drives for $600 bucks, hard to justify for most people (even the HPC crowd) when NVMe drives are for the most part nearly as fast as Optane drives.
Unfortunately for Intel, the only credible benefit for the non-volatile nature of Optane is the caching aspect. This has no real-world benefit to an SSD. The way block management and the indirection table works in Optane obviously reduced latency but that is a non-issue for desktop applications, especially gaming where the data is large sustained chunks loaded in a single burst.
The last, obvious niche for Optane is enterprise, and this is where it will probably have the most success (as far as profitability) because the durability and low latency.
YukaKun - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
I answer to myself: It's in the first link xDxidex2 - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
Like seriously? 80 cents is a discount for you? You must be a troll or something.YukaKun - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
I do like trolling from time to time, yes. In this case, I'm not though.The word "value" does not mean what you think it means.
Cheers!
p1esk - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
Does anyone still uses HDDs in 2018 for anything other than NAS?Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
Games. At $0.30-$0.40/GB, SSDs are still very expensive for storing games.FwFred - Thursday, April 12, 2018 - link
I guess you don't have a large multi terabyte photo and video Lightroom catalogue.Flunk - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
A 16GB Optane buffer isn't going to help much with that either.Phyzzi - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
If you do serious photo or video editing, it absolutely could help with that, even if it was just keeping the editor in cach so you don't have to wait for a hdd lookup each time you use a program featurewumpus - Monday, April 16, 2018 - link
I think you are wildly overestimating how much memory a photo can take up (gigapixels? really?). Video is of course another story, and you could always user more memory, but is 16G really enough to make a difference (I'm guessing yes, but you still want to pop for 32G or more).Considering this is a CPU bundle (and thus starting a build), for video editing I would certainly start with Ryzen, and try to move as much to SSD as possible (and especially find out if the 470 could make my life easier and preferably using a PCIe SSD as cache.
MattTheTechLV - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
You would be surprised how many first time clients I get, that don't have even have an SSD for a boot drive. It's almost always the first thing I do with a new client, is get them purchase enough 850/950 Evos for every Workstation in their business, and allow me to migrate the systems over, and they ALWAYS have the same surprised reaction, they will never go back to traditional spinning rust.It's easy for us in the enthusiast market to wonder how not everybody has converted by now, but trust me, there is a whole world of small to midsize businesses out there, that haven't even heard of SSDs, and have no CTO or IT department to advise them, and then to think, all their employees that work on these slow systems who go home and probably have systems just as slow because they also don't know about SSDs, trust me, they are out there.
Phyzzi - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
Thank you!Even in the world of SSD's there are fast ones and slow ones, and this is decidely fast.
It's also a nice intermediate to a full system on a chip, taken with other developments like the the high end GPU integration that they are doing with AMD. This chip may seem like the target audience is limited, but if the next step is a package with 64 or 128 GB ssd, integrated ram and a high end gpu, all on a single chip, every ultralight laptop maker in the world will want that.
Native7i - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
Yes. For gamesPeachNCream - Monday, April 16, 2018 - link
I have a 1TB 5400RPM hard drive in one of my laptops because I needed the storage space and didn't want to tote around an external drive. It runs Linux so it's not as painful as Windows on boot up or when loading programs, but I am thinking about picking up a similar size SSD. Then again, it's a seven year old laptop so I'm loathe to throw money at storage far in excess of the computer's current value.emvonline - Monday, April 16, 2018 - link
@p1esk: most pcs (desktop + notebook) sold in 2018 come with HDD. >2/3 PCs in use have only HDDwumpus - Monday, April 16, 2018 - link
Traditionally, there was a saying "the steady state of a hard drive is full". These days, plenty of people simply don't fill up more than 100G of space (obviously neither gamers nor other heavy computer users), and thus don't need rotating rust. For everybody else, $50-70 for a few terabytes is a godsend, and simply a required item in any build.Of course, once you start collecting a few of these there is the obvious question of leaving them in your PC or adding a NAS. Single users (or only heavy user in a family) can obviously get away with leaving them in a PC, but others will want the NAS (if only for media storage).
There's also the issue of windows occasionally simply *has* to spin every drive it has. That is annoying. I don't think I've seen this in Linux even though Linus has been quoted in the "all rotating rust belongs in a NAS" camp (the actual quote was more about "PCs should be all SSD").
Personally, I'd be much more interested in AMD's 470 board and simply using a chunk of a SSD. If Intel is serious about doing this with optane, they need to imbed the stuff in the motherboard/south bridge and cache SSDs. Very few people who are willing to pay for 16G of cache want it on their HDD.
crimson117 - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
Are all those performance numbers in comparison to a purely traditional HDD setup?If so, that's kind of worthless...
PeachNCream - Friday, April 13, 2018 - link
I'm not really very interested in Optane as a drive cache at this point. Using any SSD, even a budget TLC drive, will give the person at the keyboard a system that's responsive enough. What I see in Optane's future are the benefits of superior endurance versus NAND so it or some later iteration of it can replace current solid state storage and integration with RAM on DIMMs for lower power operation, saving current system states, or just pairing up storage with system memory for tighter integration and smaller system. Those are exciting and interesting. Using Optane as a way to compensate for being stuck on a mechanical hard drive (I get it, there are some situations where the capacity is a necessity and the speed isn't as big of a factor) feels oddly similar to how Windows Vista's ReadyBoost was a poor alternative to getting more RAM for your computer.Lolimaster - Saturday, April 14, 2018 - link
It's actually better to use the small optane as pagefile rather than a "boost".Hixbot - Saturday, April 14, 2018 - link
Any chance anandtech editors can review the "from the web" clickbait at the bottom of every article. Many have inappropriate images for the workplace.Ryan Smith - Monday, April 16, 2018 - link
Hey Hixbot.The RevContent ads are approved by our publisher's advertising group. So I don't have direct editorial control over them. But all the same I appreciate the feedback and I will pass along your comments to the group.
Hixbot - Wednesday, April 18, 2018 - link
I appreciate your reply!