Trying to Build on LGA 4189 w/ Intel Optane Memory

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Ok, so I’ve been snooping around looking for good deals on parts for a workstation build. I ended up stumbling into LGA 4189 to build off of and this motherboard interests me:

https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/motherboard/x12spa-tf

As well as this CPU:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/212288/intel-xeon-platinum-8351n-processor-54m-cache-2-40-ghz/specifications.html

And using these Optane memory dimms

Now honestly, I don’t know much about optane other than the storage devices that were really cool a couple years ago with the super low latency and everything. How do these work as memory dimms? Do I need some “real memory” and then optane? Will this run on a normal Linux installation? Etc, etc.

It’s hard to find a lot of specifies with this stuff so any help is appreciated.

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I thought you needed barlow pass for icelake, not apache pass.

Optane pmem is an interesting idea, I don’t have any super customized workloads so I think the only useful way to use it would be to just use the pmem as normal block device storage.

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Correct. This article from STH explains the different revisions.

For workstation use I would go with an off-roadmap part like the Platinum 8375C. Much higher base clocks than the 8351N.

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I’ll look into that, sadly from a cursory look, the price increases dramatically

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Is the optane not treated as normal memory?

I found this article that seems to describe it can be used in memory mode with normal DDR4 acting as a cache. Very interesting but also very confusing on how I would go about setting this up.

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Thank you for pointing that out! Saved me some headache.

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In memory mode, the DDR4 is converted to a cache. It can also be used as a block device for storage, or addressed directly through Intel APIs. This is done without user intervention, after you choose which mode you want in the UEFI. Aside from that, it is transparent to you.

For example, I use my system in memory mode. So my memory capacity is shown as the 2TB of Optane. Aside from that, no configuration was required.

You can read in depth about all the configurations in this document. While this document specifically mentions HP workstations, the concepts are applicable to any Optane DCPMM system.

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