 That right there is a 512 gigabyte DIMM. Inside this box is a server with somewhere in the neighborhood of three to six terabytes of memory, sort of. This gives it the capability to run workloads like simulations with never before seen complexity without suffering large performance penalties for swapping data in and out of its bulk storage, mostly. Now the really savvy among you probably already have an idea of what's in here. But for everyone else, let me tell you something. What if I said that you could take an SSD and put it right into your system memory slot instead of RAM? Ka-boom! Boom! Today's video is brought to you by Pulseway. Those guys are always all over our server content. And why not? Pulseway is a great way to remotely manage your servers and other IT infrastructure. Check them out at the link below to learn more. Now I'm not really expecting this thing to look unusual, but it is very, very unusual. This is an accessory kit. Whatever this is. What the hell is this? On the one end, it looks like a little tiny PCI Express six pin. And on the other end, it looks like a little tiny SATA connector. What the heck? It's labeled ODD. So optical drive? Does this thing have an optical drive? You're gonna be kidding me. Oh! Oh wow. It's a skinny boy. It's a 1U. So this is a super slim server designed to be rack mounted with very high densities. Oh! It's heavier than it looks. One second. All right, is there anything else important in here? Let's go with no. Sweet. Okay. Well, somebody voided the warranty before I got to it. You know, I was wondering why it comes with a safety data sheet and a big warning label on the side. Turns out it's got a lithium battery, a CR whatever, you know, one of those little button cells making sure the BIOS doesn't lose its data while the system's powered off. Naturally, a server has a very different port configuration compared to a desktop or a workstation. So back here, we've got a couple of PCI Express slots, but it looks like some kind of mezzanine card you'll have to pop it open. Three USB threes, that's it. And then four network ports, one of which is for management. So you can actually perform BIOS updates, install operating systems, all that kind of low level stuff, monitor temperatures and fans and all that good stuff over the network rather than being plugged in directly. If you do need to plug in directly, of course, it's got VGA out so you can get that graphics, you know, connection on there. For storage, what are we looking at here? Oh, wow. Oh, they went and they put some good stuff in here. Neat. Well, we've got at least two of Intel's DCP4610 NVMe SSDs. So that's cool. That answers my question as to whether these were NVMe or SATA Base. More NVMe, oh, no. So these are higher capacity, lower performance 4610s. These are SATA. It has taken all of my self control to not open this thing up yet. I actually don't even know exactly what CPU is in this freaking thing. In fact, okay, that's interesting. I didn't know that there were two CPUs in this thing. We requested a demo unit back in July. So I'm thinking they are possibly Cascade Lake CPUs with Barlow Pass DIMMs, but they could also be first gen Apache Pass DIMMs, which are about 80% as performance. To be clear, they're still gonna be pretty flippin' high performance, and I'm expecting them to be pretty high capacity. Let's have a look here. Oh, oh my. Check this out, ladies and gentlemen. That right there is a 512 gigabyte DIMM. But notice that I didn't say 512 gigabyte memory module. If you look closely at all the memory that's stacked up in this thing, well, do the math. If all of these were 512 gigs, that would be 12 terabytes of memory. That's more than these Xeon CPUs even support. So if you look closely, check this out. Half of them are traditional DDR4 memory modules. So these ones right here, 32 gig ECC registered DIMMs from Micron. And the other half are this. This is Intel's DCPMM, or data center persistent memory module. And on these is not DRAM. There's no memory on them. I mean, there's memory in the sense that you can like store things on them and the system can work with that data, but no DRAM memory. So it actually uses the same Optane chips that you would find in something like a high performance storage drive, or one of those little Optane memory modules that Intel sells as like a nitro boost for your mechanical hard drive. Oh dear Lord, no. Oh my God, how much does it cost? Wow, what a good question. Well, I think I found a four pack of these modules for nine grand. So we have 12 of them. I'll pay you that. I'm just under $30,000 for the Optane modules alone. You got probably another couple grand in regular memory. Let's call it 30 grand total in memory. Depending on what CPUs these are, they could be anywhere from five to 10 grand each. I think it's pretty safe to say that this whole thing is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 to 60,000 US dollars. So no Intel will not be leaving it with us, but we get to play with it. It's just trippy, you know, like it's not that often that I encounter hardware so high end that I'm just like, but like, look at this. These are PCI express 24X slots. Ever seen one of those? Unless you're in the server space, probably not. I mean, they've got them just adapted to 16X slots, but these expansion slots right here, or this OCP mezzanine spot right here could be used for like super high speed networking. What else we got? Oh, I answered my question from earlier. It looks like these four slots are actually configured for SATA only based on the connectors that are in them. But I'm not sure if you, yeah, if you had another board or used a PCI express slot, it looks like the back plane does support NVMe. Just it's a universal back plane, but it's not U.3. So you can't just plug in either kind of drive regardless of what it's hooked up to. Okay, should we power it on? No, we shouldn't. Actually, what we should talk about is how these memory modules are used. So there's a couple of different ways that they can be configured. Either in app direct mode, where the system actually recognizes the DIMM as persistent storage, just like a regular SSD, but connected to a high speed memory interface directly to the CPU, or they can operate in memory mode, where the system recognizes them as very, very high capacity memory modules and uses them in exactly the same way. Now, as you guys can imagine, inter compatibility of a memory slot between DRAM and storage chips is not the kind of thing that happens overnight. It was actually three and a half years ago that I first attended an octane briefing at Intel's Folsom campus. The idea seemed pretty sound. Octane comes in here with lower capacities and higher cost than the NAND that's traditionally found in solid state drives, but then higher capacities and lower cost relative to DRAM, which is what you would normally find on a memory module. As for performance, they projected latency somewhere in between the two, but closer to DRAM than to NAND. And the pricing at least has somewhat held true in the real world. I found that it's a little under half the price of a memory module and definitely available at higher capacities. It should be noted though, that these retail online prices are rarely what would be paid by an actual enterprise or a data center customer. Oh, I didn't really think of this. Before we fire this up, I'm kind of gonna need a boot drive. So I'll have to run and grab an M.2 to throw in here. And that's not as crazy as it sounds. I mean, yes, I know, Linus, this thing is full of storage. Why don't you just install an OS on it and off you go? Well, that's not really how a device like this is intended to be used. I know it does have terabytes of storage in both the bays at the front and the memory slots, but this is more of a compute node. And all these tiers of storage are meant to keep the CPU chock full of data to crunch so that it can run at peak efficiency. So you've actually got five tiers of storage in here. You've got the SRAM. So that's your cache on the CPU. You've got your DRAM, which is in half of these memory slots. You've got your Optane memory. So that's in the other half. You've got your NVMe SSDs over here. And then finally, you've got your SATA SSDs over here. So whatever the CPU needs the quickest access to stays closest to it. And whatever is less important falls away onto these slower tiers. Oh wait, it's not that loud cause it's not actually on. The fans are powered up even before you turn it on. Here we go. That's actually quieter than I expected. It's pretty good. Oh, there it goes. Hey, it's survived. It's actually quieter than I expected. Pretty good. Oh, there it goes. Hey, it's survived. Dropping into the BIOS, we're running Xeon Platinum 8260Ls. And this poor thing has no idea what's going on with the memory here. It's like, oh yeah, you got about three terabytes of RAM, except that if we pop in here, ah yes, these are the real numbers. 384 gigs of DRAM and six terabytes of Intel's Optane persistent memory modules. Now BIOS optimizations to make this work are important, both your settings and your vendor firmware. Lenovo seems to recommend anywhere from a one to four to one to 16 ratio of DRAM to persistent memory, depending on what you're doing. And as for Intel's guidance, they say that applications like Redis IMDB run well with an eight to one config, while legacy databases like Microsoft SQL runs ideal in like a four to one config. There's also times where two to one works best if you wanna minimize cache misses. So that's times when the CPU is trying to find something in DRAM, but it's already been demoted to persistent memory. I mean, this is mind blowing to me. Like my mind was already blown, way back in the Athlon XP days, when I found out that you could run dual channel with three sticks, if you have one high capacity stick and then two half capacity sticks. I was like, what? This, another level of mind blown, totally different capacities and not even the same kinds of chips on the dims. That's hilarious. This thing is so not designed to boot off of a local drive. My M.2 showed up as UEFI miscellaneous device in the boot options. It was configured to boot from network, which makes way more sense, but hopefully it'll do it. My poor SSD is like, what is this stuff? Ah, we might have to do a fresh install. I've got some drivers on this thing that are not playing nicely. AMD Ryzen master driver dot sis crashed. It was on an AMD system before. Just installed chipset drivers. So everything is picking up correctly now. Here's what I wanna know though. When I open up task manager, what am I gonna see? Aha. Okay. So we got 48 CPU cores. Yeah, that's all as expected. Pretty sweet. And we got two terabytes apparently of memory with 4.3 terabytes hardware reserved for 6.3 terabytes. How does this math work? From what I can glean, our persistent memory modules seem to be just operating as expanded system memory, but even within that mode, there are multiple modes. So there's a bandwidth optimized mode and a latency optimized mode. And then Intel actually came out with a balanced mode after launch that they said works pretty darn well, where it uses the DRAM as a cache. And then the Optane persistent memory as like a large dumping ground, giving you DRAM like performance depending on the workload. Even though Optane is an order of magnitude slower in terms of latency. Now, obviously benchmarking something like this isn't as simple as firing up Cinebench and being like, yeah, you know, it's really good. It's really fast or it's not very good. So guys, stay tuned. This is just the unboxing, making sure it works. Oh my gosh, this thing's crazy. And Anthony or Jake is probably gonna end up putting this thing through its paces over the next little while. Which raises the question, what kind of benchmarks would they even run? Who's the audience for this? Well, if you had a very large database that you wanted to run in memory for extreme performance, you could run it in memory mode. If for whatever reason you needed extremely fast storage, like a really fast storage device, you could run it in storage mode or block mode. I mean, yeah, you could also just use Optane in an NVMe device, like what we've actually got installed on the front here. But the advantage in this case is that instead of contending with PCI Express, which is going to be a bottleneck depending what you're doing, and an NVMe protocol that was designed first and foremost for NAND, you're communicating with your storage over the much faster memory interface that's built right into the CPU. But get this, it's not all boring stuff like that. In 2019, you can see we're just running Windows 10 here, guys, Microsoft rolled support for this product into Windows 10, allowing it to be used for rendering, simulation, and scientific tasks that are certainly heavy, but not necessarily in the data center. So workstations with multiple terabytes of RAM, that could be very interesting for a lot of people. Now, DIMMs with persistent storage already exist. They're called NVDIM, but the difference is that instead of having high speed DRAM and then slower NAND that it can flush to when it's powered off, this is just all obtained all the time thanks to its much higher rate endurance. So that's it for today. That's the introduction to this tech. Holy is it ever cool. And we're gonna have a follow-up for you guys where we really put it through its paces. And this video is brought to you of course, by the real-time remote monitoring and management software that we use for our servers, Pulseway. It works for not just servers. You can deploy it on workstations, laptops, anything. It helps you fix problems on the go by sending commands from any mobile device. It's compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux. And their single app gives you remote desktop functionality. You can get real-time status, monitor system resources, check logged in users and network performance. You can manage Windows updates. Their endpoint protection function allows you to install Pulseway antivirus across systems and ensure they're fully protected at all times. And you can create, deploy, and automate custom scripts to automate your IT tasks like deployments, patching, security, backups, reports, and more. So try it for free at pulseway.com or through our link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out our last big server upgrade series, Petabyte Project Who, where we rolled out a petabyte of storage in a single 4U enclosure. That's just four times the thickness of this one. And we did it twice.