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Comment by fsaintjacques | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK, the Optane disks are _byte_ addressable.

Not even DDR4 RAM is byte-addressable. DDR4 is typically burst-length 8 for 64-bytes per burst (although BL2 exists, I'm fairly certain all modern processors have settled on BL8)

I think you can still do non burst transactions and even set masks on byte granularity for writes. Classic processors probably don't do that, though.

I don't really know much about memory controllers, but being able to mask at the byte level seems like an important optimization. Without that, many writes will have to do a read first to them merge the read bytes with the dirty bytes.

The capacitors inside of DRAM cells are so small, that the very act of reading the DRAM cell obliterates the data. I'm not kidding.

The "Full procedure" of reading a DRAM cell is:

1. Row-Address -- Load a "row" (usually 1k to 8k. DDR4 is 8k IIRC) to the sense amplifiers. Sense-amplifiers can indefinitely hold data, but there's relatively few of them.

2. Column Address -- Once loaded, you talk to the sense-amplifiers.

3. Precharge -- You begin to move the data from the sense-amplifiers back to the DRAM cells. Again, step #1 obliterated the data, you have to write it back regardless.

4. Row-Address -- After the old data is loaded, you send it back.

So regardless, you have to Read-then-write EVERY time. In fact, DDR4 has faster write-speeds because you don't have to do the read step if you are only writing.

While this is true, the point was that it's an important optimization to avoid doing RMW at the memory controller level. If you did it there, it would cost tens of nanoseconds. Doing an on-die refresh in parallel with the write is almost free.

I think with both DDR3 and DDR4, the number of bits in the row address depends on the DRAM density.

That was the goal yes but currently via nvme you can only write at a block level. Presumably the ram interface will be byte addressable and driverless.

I'm curious about this, could you point at the documentation?

Which part? The NVMe spec is at https://nvmexpress.org/

Intel doesn't publicly share the full specifications documents for their SSDs any more, just the 2-page product briefs. And the news article contains all the official information that's public so far about the Optane DIMMs.

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