Does optane work with AMD? I was under the impression that it did not. It’s not just another type of SSD.
It's a little confusing because Intel markets "Optane" as so many different things. "Optane" as marketed to the consumer is a combination of an Optane NVMe drive and motherboard-level support for disk caching. However, if you choose not to use the caching software, it just turns into a SSD.
The only catch is that most optane drives are pretty small. The consumer ones intended for cache are about 16GB. However, you can buy bigger ones up to about 120GB in M.2 format, and PCIe or U.2 based ones up to 1.5 TB aimed at the prosumer market.
AMD actually does really well with these because they have an extra x4 PCIe lanes (16+4 + 4 more for chipset) so you can run a graphics card at x16 speed and still have 4 more CPU-direct lanes for an Optane drive.
Then on servers you have Optane DIMMs which sorta-not-really replace RAM for massive in-memory servers.
Seems like it only works with Intel 7th gen and later.
Although there's a post on the LTT forums[0] exclaiming that Wendell managed to get it working. (although he also got Thunderbolt working before on AMD)
[0]: https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/961841-we-ran-intel-opt...
NVMe Optane as a product just shows up as a small, fast drive. StoreMI works with it, even faster than Intel's stuff in some cases.
There's Optane memory, which is the one the link is referring to, it needs Intel CPUs
Then there's Optane SSDs, which works with AMD fine
Source: I'm using them on EPYC servers
Optane memory is not a traditional SSD, it's more of a disk cache, matched to the Intel CPU. While the rest of the Optane family are standard SSDs
If you follow Intel's marketing "Optane Memory" refers to the SSDs. The Optane DIMMs are called "Optane DC Persistent Memory".
The natural things to call them are "Optane drives" and "Optane memory". Don't criss-cross that!
I don't imagine PCIe 4.0 will make much difference as a single drive can't make use of the extra bandwidth anyway - but I'm curious to see if there are improvements to the 3D XPoint memory. Kinda bummed I literally just bought mine.