Great article, Mark!

I have a few notes and questions:

1. Here's a brief comparison of different storage categories:

  • Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory has read throughput of 6.8 GB/s and write throughput 1.85 GB/s (source).
  • Intel® Optane™ SSD has read throughput of 2.5 GB/s and write throughput of 2.2 GB/s at (source).
  • Modern DDR4 RAM has read throughput of ~25 GB/s.

While I certainly see the appeal of DC Persistent Memory if we need more memory than RAM can provide, is it useful on smaller scale? Say I have a few hundred gigabytes of indices I need to keep in global buffer and be able to read-access fast. Would plain DDR4 RAM be better? Costs seem comparable and read throughput of 25 Gb/s seems considerably better.

2. What RAM was used in a Server #1 configuration?

3. Why are there different CPUs between servers?

4. Workload link does not work.