News Intel announces Optane system requirements

Drops planned Skylake support.
https://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2017/02/21/intel-optane-system-requirements/1

 

It's an SSD that's (supposed to be almost) as fast as RAM. It'll come in two flavours, when it eventually comes: M.2 for PCs and DIMM for servers. The DIMM stuff is designed to effectively replace dynamic RAM in certain applications; the M.2 stuff is designed to act as a cache between RAM and mass storage (although, theoretically, there shouldn't be anything to stop you using it as a plain storage device if you really wanted to.)

The end-game, though is to basically do away with DRAM altogether and just have 'storage' which acts as both working memory and long-term storage. That'd bring with it some major advantages: doesn't matter if your computer loses power 'cos when it comes back it's exactly the same as when it went off (assuming the CPU caches are also non-volatile, of course, or there's a battery backup for 'em), you don't have to load anything into memory 'cos it's already in memory (which effectively means zero loading times), and you no longer have to worry about buying enough memory to cope with your working data 'cos all your storage is memory (so that 1TB database you're playing with is now an in-memory database.)

It also does away with one of the major complexities of DRAM: the fact you have to keep refreshing the bloody stuff or it forgets what it's doing. Back in the day we used to use static RAM (SRAM), which was technically volatile in that without power it'd eventually lose what it was doing but didn't need constant refreshing. It was faster than DRAM and could be made sort-of-non-volatile simply by sticking a battery on the PCB (something a lot of PCMCIA SRAM cards used to do). Trouble is, it was also expensive so we switched to DRAM and the joys of constant refresh cycles. Without the need to constantly refresh the contents of RAM, performance will increase and the complexity of a computer will drop - both of which are noble goals.

 

I've got the cheaper version in my Cambridge Computers (which was founded by Uncle Clive after Amstrad bought Sinclair Research) Z88: 32KB EPROM carts. Solid state storage, but you can only write to it once. When it's full, you take it out of the Z88 and put it under a UV light to wipe it entirely, then you can write another 32KB to it. No editing of files you've stored on there (just load 'em then save 'em as FILENAME-2, FILENAME-3 and so forth) and no deleting individual files - and it takes a full half-hour to wipe properly if you're using a period-appropriate eraser (or about five to ten minutes if you're using a modern one).

Total pain in the harris, but it worked.

 

Except you appear to have missed the bit where Intel demonstrated Optane running on a Skylake system in 2015, as detailed in the article. So, the decision to make it a Kaby Lake-or-newer exclusive does not appear to be a technological one.

 

Optane, not Octane, and my point was that a 200-series chipset wasn't always a requirement, 'cos Intel demoed the platform running on a Skylake board.

In the case of Da Future, where volatile memory is no longer a thing, you'd simply use your choice of a journaled filesystem or a copy-on-write filesystem. If everything goes non-linear, just reboot and the system will roll back the corruption (either using the journal or by using the last copy, depending on your chosen filesystem).

My desktop uses both options: the system drive is formatted ext4, which is a journaled filesystem, and the data drive is formatted Btrfs, which is a copy-on-write filesystem. The former basically says "dear diary, today I'm going to modify file foo to say bar" then if it screws up it can look at the journal and say either "oh, it was supposed to say bar, let me fix that" or "everything went wrong, let's make the file say foo again"; the latter says "I'm modifying foo and saving it as bar; foo still exists, but the reference points to bar" then if it screws up it can say "sod it, I'm pointing the reference back to foo again."

The nice part of not having volatile memory any more, though, is that if you reboot your computer now 'cos one application hung the system you lose everything that was in memory at the time; in our theoretical non-volatile PC it'd only have to roll back the thing that got corrupted, so everything else pops back up as though nothing happened.

 

No more extreme than the error checking and correction that your current SSD has. At least, I hope your data isn't being eaten by random errors propagating through the system!