Intel Optane Memory Download [TOP]

Analysis Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has confirmed that Intel will quit its Optane business, ending its attempt to create and promote a tier of memory that's a little slower than RAM but had the virtues of persistence and high IOPS.

From a distance, Intel's Optane DIMMs looked no different than your run-of-the-mill DDR4, apart from, maybe, as a heat spreader. However, on closer inspection the DIMMs could be had in capacities far greater than is possible with DDR4 memory today. Capacities of 512GB per DIMM weren't uncommon.

Intel Optane Memory Download

Download 🔥 https://urlin.us/2y3ARw 🔥

The DIMMs slotted in alongside standard DDR4 and enabled a number of novel use cases, including a tiered memory architecture that was essentially transparent to the operating system software. When deployed in this fashion, the DDR memory was treated as a large level-4 cache, with the Optane memory behaving as system memory.

While offering nowhere near the performance of DRAM, the approach enabled the deployment of very large, memory-intensive workloads, like databases, at a fraction of the cost of an equivalent amount of DDR4, without requiring software customization. That was the idea, anyway.

Micron this week began volume production of a 232-layer module that will push consumer SSDs into 10+ GB/sec territory. That's still not fast or low latency enough to replace Optane for large in-memory workloads, analysts tell The Register, but it's getting awfully close to the 17GB/sec offered by a single channel of low-end DDR4.

So if NAND isn't the answer, then what? Well, there's actually an alternative to Optane memory on the horizon. It's called compute express link (CXL) and Intel is already heavily invested in the technology. Introduced in 2019, CXL defines a cache-coherent interface for connecting CPUs, memory, accelerators, and other peripherals.

CXL 1.1, which will ship alongside Intel's long-delayed Sapphire Rapids Xeon Scalable and AMD's fourth-gen Eypc Genoa and Bergamo processors later this year, enables memory to be attached directly to the CPU over the PCIe 5.0 link.

What's more, because the memory is managed by a CXL controller on the expansion card, older and cheaper DDR4 or even DDR3 modules could be used alongside modern DDR5 DIMMs. In this regard, the CXL-based memory tiering could be superior as it doesn't rely on a specialized memory architecture like 3D XPoint.

Today, I have installed version # 19.5.2.1049.5 from -rapid-storage-technology-driver-installation-software-with-intel-optane-memory-11th-and-12th-gen-platforms.html?wapkw=rst. It appears to show the same version and date I had previously. I have restarted and everything seems to work fine now, but it ALWAYS works fine after a restart, so because nothing appears to have changed, I expect this problem is not fixed (but would love to be wrong about that).

While Jocelyn M's response was pretty far off the mark and did not answer any of my questions, I did download the latest RST from Intel, version 19.5.2.1049.5 at -rapid-storage-technology-driver-installation-software-with-intel-optane-memory-11th-up-to-13th-gen-platforms.html?wapkw=rst

First of all, let's establish a baseline. I am not a techie. I have a working knowledge but as I looked at all of the topics in the forum about Optane memory, I have to admit I am intimidated.

The Issue:

I received a notice that my optane memory is starting to degrade. I have a an H10 with a 1TB SSD on a HP Spectre i7-10750H. From what i understand, I need to disable the Optane memory. I opened the Intel Optane Memory and Storage Manager and all i get is an endless spiral and "preparing system". I downloaded the Intel driver utility and updated all of my intel drivers and no change. I downloaded and reinstalled the Memory and Storage Manager and same result.

i am all backed up and ready to go, however....

while the GUI memory storage tool says everything is ok, the Optane memory tool which came pre-installed says otherwise and I received a windows notification. I have included pics of all 3.

@klowe @BrusC_Intel

thanks to the awesome instructions from @klowe about disabling Optane in the BIOS successfully completed that part of the operation. Three quick questions:

1. @klowe what do you mean by "cleaned" the optane drive?

2. @BrusC_Intel what are the repurcussions of NOT re-enabling the Optane storage?

I recently purchased, but haven't yet received, a laptop which has 4 GB of standard RAM, and 16 GB of Intel Optane memory. The laptop was marketed as having 20 GB of memory, but after reading more about Optane memory, it seems that it serves more as a low-latency cache than as RAM.

For the purpose of running several memory-intensive programs simultaneously (e.g. browser with many tabs, data science IDEs) which average 5 GB of RAM usage, will decreasing RAM from 8 GB to 4 GB but adding 16 GB of Optane memory cause a performance slowdown?

For a long time, RAM has been often called 'memory' in laptops targeted at the layperson. This is usually helpful and hasn't caused issues, until recently. The same companies that started this practice are now lumping Optane cache and RAM under the same name 'memory' with the intention of tricking you into thinking that the laptop has more RAM than it actually has. Optane technology is still relatively new and unknown so this deception is very easy to fall for. Looking deeper into a product listing will usually reveal the truth.

In this context (budget consumer gear), Optane is pretty clearly just referring to a small/fast NVMe-connected SSD using 3D XPoint memory (instead of NAND flash), giving it a very high write endurance. (So it won't wear out if used as swap space).

This is still going to suck for many workloads, because it still takes a page-fault and many microseconds to access, vs. ~70 nanoseconds for a DRAM access (cache miss); it's not directly memory-mapped on the CPUs memory bus. Also, out-of-order execution / HW prefetch / other memory-parallelism can keep ~10 cache misses in flight per physical core, but a page fault is serializing. No useful work can be happening (in this thread) while the OS is servicing a page fault, so there's no opportunity for OoO exec to hide any of that hard page fault latency. (But even 70ns is too long to fully hide anyway. Still, having multiple misses in flight to different lines goes a long way toward mitigating it for some workloads.)

Using a cripplingly-small amount of RAM and depending on a fast SSD for swap space / pagefile is not the only use-case for this kind of Optane. (And probably not even a good use-case). As -optane-memory-matters/index.html describes, it's main use-case is as a transparent cache for a magnetic hard drive. I think Intel provides Windows drivers to make this happen. You can buy SATA hard drives that have rotational magnetic storage with some flash built-in as a buffer / cache for frequently-accessed parts of the disk. Optane HW + drivers can do this for any disk.

Not particularly amazing for large contiguous writes of big files; hopefully the driver software knows to bypass the Optane cache and go straight to the underlying magnetic disk for that. Intel's main Optane page links to -storage/optane-memory/optane-16gb-m-2-80mm.html which shows their 16GB M.2 Optane has 900MB/s sequential read, but only 145MB/s sequential write. The 32GB version is faster, at 1350 MB/s read, 290 MB/s write. But again, those aren't what Optane is best at. It's sequential and random read IOPS are both 240k IOPS, with 7 s read latency.

Intel has something called IMDT (Intel Memory Drive Technology) which is a hypervisor that creates the illusion of a larger main memory address space for the operating system. Some pages will be mapped to the actual DRAM main memory while others are mapped to the SSD memory. When a page mapped to the SSD is accessed, a page fault occurs caught by IMDT, which will cause the page to be brought from the SSD to main memory (potentially evicting a page from memory to the SSD). IMDT will try to prefetch pages into DRAM to alleviate the inferior bandwidth and latency of the SSD. It will also try to keep the hottest pages in main memory so that they can be accessed with minimal penalty (the only penalty may come from the additional paging layers due to virtualization.) The OS is mostly oblivious to this mapping and works normally. This kind of memory system is called software-defined memory (SDM). The nice paper titled "Evaluation of Intel Memory Drive Technology Performance for Scientific Applications" provides a performance evaluation of IMDT and compares it against a system that has the same amount of DRAM main memory. I've not thoroughly read the paper, but it appears that IMDT can migrate pages between NUMA nodes to get them closer to the node where they are mostly needed.

3D XPoint Non-volatile DIMMs, aka "Optane DC Persistent Memory". -launches-optane-dimms-up-to-512gb-apache-pass-is-here. Apache Pass is the name of the first-generation Optane DC PM. Refer to this for information on future generations.

This is non-volatile storage that plugs in to a DDR4 DIMM slot, and appears as actual physical memory. Apparently it's only fully supported by next-generation Xeons (not the current Skylake-X aka Skylake Scalable Processor series).

-automation/why-are-nvdimms-suddenly-hot has some more general info on NVDIMMs (and JEDEC standardization of them, and how OS + applications can cooperate to let applications talk directly to a region of memory mapped NV storage, ensuring commit ordering and so on). The main point is that they actually blur the line between RAM and storage (in a computer-architecture sense, not in the strictly-marketing sense of the deceptive laptop ad you saw that claimed 4+16GB.)

The OS can let a process map this non-volatile physical memory into their own virtual address space so they can access storage directly with user-space loads and stores to memory addresses, without any system calls, letting the CPU hardware continue out-of-order execution while there are outstanding reads/writes. (There are software libraries to let developers take advantage of this, including the ability to flush() and make sure that data is actually written to persistent storage. 2351a5e196