Aug 09, 2022 23:00:00

Why was Intel's innovative memory technology 'Optane' born?

At the

financial results announcement in July 2022, Intel announced a policy to terminate the business of the memory technology ' Optane ' jointly developed with Micron Technology. Liam Proven, a reporter at The Register, explains why Optane, which is as fast as DRAM but can be offered at a low price range like SSD, was born and why it disappeared.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for the entire IT world • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancellation/

Mr. Proven describes Optane as 'innovative, but it was not popular because there were very few people who understood how innovative Optane was.'

Since the distinction between the primary storage device that is the main memory (RAM) and the secondary storage device called 'disk' or 'drive' was born in the PC, even if you start the computer or use some program, ' Proven points out that the behavior of 'loading from disk to RAM' has been established.

Disk controllers and SSDs have been developed to simplify the operating system's task of indexing disk contents, finding the parts it needs, and loading them into memory.

SSDs have the ability to shuffle blocks of storage that can normally only be erased in chunks of 1 megabyte or larger, and emulate a hard disk-like ability to write 512-byte sectors. However, in order to rewrite one byte of flash memory that the OS accesses in the same way as an SSD, there was a limitation that the rest of the contents of that block had to be copied to another location and the entire block had to be erased.

by UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Optane made it possible to eliminate it. Although it was similar in size to an SSD, it could be installed directly into a DIMM slot on the motherboard, displayed in 1-byte units on the processor's memory map, and had the ability to be directly rewritten in 1-byte units. Optane has become a primary storage device with almost the role of a secondary storage device, such as the program continues to exist in memory once loaded.

However, Proven points out that ``current mainstream operating systems do not understand the concept of a computer that has only primary storage and is divided into a small volatile section and a large non-volatile section.'' Although Linux responded by emulating a secondary storage device with software, other OSes responded passively across the board, saying, ``Despite being an invention since the minicomputer, no one was able to master it. ” he concluded.