Power Consumption and Polling
Power Consumption
Intel clearly wanted to certify Optane Memory in the worst case installation scenarios, which means power draw must be kept considerably lower than your typical M.2 NVMe SSD. While the 960 EVO 250GB SSD draws upwards of 6 Watts at full load, the 32GB Optane Memory part draws closer to 2.5 Watts when loaded. It is worth noting that Optane has a higher idle draw (~1.2W) than the Samsung part (0.7W), seen at the far left of the plot.
For those curious about thermal throttling, all tests in this article were performed with no airflow directed at the Optane Memory module. Even the enterprise workloads and RAID-0 testing were performed with no observable throttling at any point in those tests.
Polling
As we discussed in out P4800X review, to get the best speed out of Optane, you need to poll the device instead of waiting for an Interrupt ReQuest (IRQ) to service the response. It appears that the Optane memory driver is polling in order to achieve the lowest possible latencies:
The above was observed during a saturated sequential read from data that was contained within the Optane cache. Such a read on its own would never peg a CPU core at 100%. This was an extreme example that could only be reproduced by our special tools. In typical use, a sequential read would never be sustained for a long period of time, as Optane Memory would ensure the read was completed as quickly as possible. Overall power consumption of an Optane Memory enabled system should remain similar to that of one without, but I do recommend the polling-associated CPU usage be re-eveluated for those looking to buy an Optane Memory enabled laptop in the future.
http://www.legitreviews.com/i
http://www.legitreviews.com/intel-optane-memory-tested-boot-drive-secondary-raid-0_194237
Intel Optane Memory Tested As Boot Drive, Secondary and RAID 0
Posted by Nathan Kirsch | Tue, May 09, 2017 – 9:42 AM
Was wondering if you had a
Was wondering if you had a 32GB Optane, a NVMe SSD and a SATA HDD. if the NVMe is the boot drive would the SATA HDD speed increase? Would the NVMe speed lower?
I need to buy a new laptop
I need to buy a new laptop (for work usage) and I am shopping for different models. Can someone please tell me which is the fastest to load applications and to run modelling programs such as AutoCAD, STAAD.Pro etc??
1. SSHD (Seagate FireCuda)
2. HDD + Intel Optane
3. SSHD (Seagate Firecuda) + Intel Optane
4. Storage HDD + M.2 SSD drive for OS partition and applications
5. Intel Optane in m.2 slot + 2.5 inch SATA SSD in storage slot
6. SATA SSD 2.5 inch as primary storage and empty/unused m.2 slot
7. SSD in m.2 slot and empty/unused slot for the 2.5 inch storage.
I already have a laptop for personal use and that’s running an ordinary HDD, it’s enough for me as all I do is check my email or watch movies. However for my work laptop I want a storage which can open and run applications quite fast. I’m confused if I should go for (HDD + Optane) or (SSD + Optane) or use only an SSD?? Will Optane give good results when combined with a 2.5 inch SATA SSD??
NOTE: All SSDs (m.2 or 2.5 inch SATA) will be Samsung.