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Comment by dis-sys | Hacker News Reader

Bought my Q6600 quad core processor 10 years ago. 10 years on, Intel still refuses to make 8 core processors mainstream to PC. Lucky enough, I don't have to listen to Intel's stories on why 8 cores are not useful for PC, I can pay AMD $300 and get Ryzen.

Just bought Intel Optane memory this morning, installed it in my AMD Ryzen DEV machine and it works perfectly without any issue. Interestingly, according to Intel, this is not suppose to happen - you are expected to use both of their latest processor/chipset to run Optane memory!

Now you tell can me who is preventing people from accessing the best techs at reasonable prices.

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> Just bought Intel Optane memory this morning, installed it in my AMD Ryzen DEV machine and it works perfectly without any issue. Interestingly, according to Intel, this is not suppose to happen - you are expected to use both of their latest processor/chipset to run Optane memory!

How are you measuring Optane working? AFAIK it's supposed to improve boot times and application load times as it learns after a few times without configuration. Are you observing this improvement or does the Optane just show up as a regular storage drive?

The Optane Memory hardware is a NVMe SSD. The caching is done in software, and Intel's caching software is locked to their most recent consumer-grade platform (and Windows 10 64-bit, and only caching the boot volume). Using caching is optional; it also makes for a very fast primary storage drive, if you can survive on a mere 32GB. Or you can use non-Intel caching software for Windows or Linux and then the only system requirement for Optane Memory is that you have PCIe lanes to connect it to.

You mean Intel doesn't want to tell the _full_ story? I have to agree with you on that. Official statement from Intel included below -

"A system that is Intel® Optane™ memory ready includes: a 7th Gen Intel® Core™ processor, an Intel® 200 series chipset, M.2 type 2280-S1-B-M connector on a PCH Remapped PCIe* Controller and Lanes in a x2 or x4 configuration with B-M keys that meet NVMe* Spec 1.1 and System BIOS that supports the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) 15.5 driver."

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tech...

Did they mention things like

"it also makes for a very fast primary storage drive, if you can survive on a mere 32GB"

"you can use non-Intel caching software for Windows or Linux and then the only system requirement for Optane Memory is that you have PCIe lanes to connect it to"

They use "Intel® Optane™" to refer to the whole "solution" including their awful Windows-specific hardware-supported caching hack (Rapid Storage Whatever), because that's how they're going to sell it to consumers. Of course the drives are normal NVMe and you can use them as L2ARC+ZIL in ZFS :D

I won't call it a normal nvme. Companies don't make/sell nvme SSD with such awful sequential R/W performance. On the other hand, its random write performance at low QD is not matched by any competitor.

It is $45 unit price is another interesting factor for me - I only need 16GBytes but I need 16GBytes each on many machines. I am not really aware of any other tier-1 brand nvme SSDs that are available in such size/price. ;)

Just FYI Optane is a full NVMe drive but when UEFI/Bios attempts to boot from it, the drive purposely sends a hard error code.

I've yet to see one person use it as a boot drive. Plenty mounting it as a "not quiet RAM disk".

I've booted Windows 10 from it on an ASRock E3V5 Gaming/OC motherboard, and haven't found anything in its behavior that seems to be non-standard (except that my first one died, but that doesn't seem to have been related to my test of it as a boot drive). Intel hasn't mentioned it being unusual that I was able to boot from it.

What kind of system configurations have you found to cause problems? I wouldn't be surprised to see the NVMe remapping feature of Intel's chipsets get in the way, but that can be disabled on virtually all systems that have the feature.

I am using Optane Memory as a 16GBytes SSD with very good write latency. In more details, I am using it with my Raft[1] library implemented in Golang. Raft log entries are saved into RocksDB with fsync enabled, it is basically a I/O latency sensitive program and arguably one of the best use cases for Optane. The write performance boost observed here is just insane. With the WAL configured to be stored on that 16GBytes Optane device and the actual table files stored on much cheaper/slower regular SSD, 16GBytes is more than enough for my use case.

Best $49 toy ever bought.

[1] https://raft.github.io/

Thanks for the link, seems like interesting material.

From what I gathered in the link in order to perform recovery you need a non-volatile and accurate history of a server's execution state? Using a RAMdisk to store the state and asynchronously writing it to SSD would not be fault tolerant enough in general?

Funny enough, I also have had a Q6600 quad, it just turned 9 a week ago. Great chipset.

...And I also just jumped on the Ryzen train. Finally a good time to be a consumer in CPU-land.

Yeah I am still using a Q6600 in the recording PC in my rehearsal room / home studio.

Great CPU - still running and more than fast enough for my recording needs (maximum 16 tracks per take - about 20 tracks per song)

Hey, I got the Q6600 too, still running great. Only problem is that the old motherboard has issue accepting new RAM, making it impossible to add RAM beyond 8GB. May be time to get a new system.

You do realize there is an i7 HEDT ("high-end desktop") lineup that has more cores for, oh, 10 years now, right? Intel will happily sell you an unlocked/overclockable 10-core processor.

If you have coin, Intel has wares.

Having the coin being the key factor here. I won't deny they're expensive. But "computer equipment gets cheaper over time" doesn't make quite as nice a story as THE MAN keeping you down, does it?

what's the advantage of buying a top tier cpu and refreshing every 10 years over buying a mid tier cpu and upgrading every 3-4 years?

None. My question is what is the advantage of upgrading Intel (quad core) processors every 3-4 years? I bought i7-4770 almost 4 years ago, I couldn't name any single application that is too slow to run on i7-4770 due to its single core performance - the constrain is always the number of cores in a single box.

true, my fx6300 has lasted me 3 years up to now, only a few graphics cards seem to have bottlenecks when I check online.

May I chime in here? Still runnung Q6600, bought it from a guy working at intel, as soon as it came out. Overclocked to 3.3GHz (on air cooling, without problems or higher voltage).

Replaced only this year because 8G memory is not enough anymore :(

For lots of use cases, four cores probably saturate the memory bus. But, yes, Intel does try to protect the Xeon brand and core count is probably part of that story.

Intel's 6/8/10-core i7 lineup all has quad-channel memory, so no, neither core count or fatter memory bus is a particular story that's unique to the Xeon brand.

Using Optane as a cache for an HDD is only supposed to work with Intel hardware. Optane can work as a really fast SSD on any system.

Intel doesn't make 8-core consumers CPUs because their 4 cores are roughly as fast as 8 AMD cores. So doubling the core count would produce too much heat.

https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+7+1800X&id=29...

https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7700

cpubenchmark's multithreaded results tend not to scale well with additional cores; comparing results between the two on other better-scaling workloads shows the 1800x blowing the pants off of the 7700k.

Well Intel didn't have to because they had peak performing chips for a long time. But now AMD will give Intel run for the money again. Intel focused more on getting better yields(margin) and power related features like much lower idle power and more C, P states, which makes sense if you're at the top. They focused on other loose ends than performance.

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