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Hardware questions! Watching some tech reviews about the newest and bluest Dell Poweredge servers and I noticed in this link that NVDIMM's for the new Dell Poweredge 740XD servers require R-DIMM's to operate properly. Why can't NVRAM-N DIMM's simply operate independently on the board? (What's preventing Dell from supporting say 1 NVRAM-N DIMM per CPU Socket and nothing else? How are R-DIMM's that different beyond the backup capability?) Thanks!

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Current operating system implementation of NVDIMM-Ns shows this memory as a block device (ie storage) where you typically mount a filesystem and use it as a regular (but really fast) disk.

See Dell EMC NVDIMM-N Persistent Memory, chapters 8 & 9.

So you still need RAM for the OS.

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  • Oh ok that makes a lot more sense, will there be implementations for NVRAM-N as a memory instead of storage solution?
    – Tmanok
    Feb 16, 2018 at 17:26
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    Ultimately, you will need to organise data in this persistent storage. Files (and therefore file system) is a convenient way to do it. So I'm not sure that another implementation/semantic is needed at all. And you can still nmapa file located in nvdimm should your application require persistent memory. And remember this principle: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_is_a_file (not sure this applies to Windows, but it definitely does for Unix/Linux)
    – sfk
    Feb 17, 2018 at 20:10

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