Intel to Wind Down Optane Memory Business | Hacker News Reader

Intel to Wind Down Optane Memory Business

anandtech.com

27 pointssynack6 comments

Kind of sad, feels like they sort of mismanaged the product line to death though. Like they even sold Optane drives aimed at consumers and like marketed for gamers. That's... not where you need something like that, it's not going to be better than any old SSD for a tenth the price, and it's not going to fool anyone.

The cool part is their random write performance with high queue depths. Really exciting in the like database-adjacent space (if you develop for the hardware specifically). But it feels like that never quite happened. Real shame, it was cool tech.

This is sad to see. I was excited by the idea that 3D XPoint research might put us on the path towards memristors, but it seems like the tech is likely too "early" to easily sell.

By that I mean: Computers are built around the idea of RAM being volatile. Having it stay populated on reboot is weird -- that's the job of the disk today.

Writing applications that have one shared, unified space for storage and memory isn't something that any tool chain does today (afaik). There is too much legacy and not enough incentive to lean in on this.

I hope somebody figures out how to take this tech to production. I'd love if my phone weren't chewing battery keeping DRAM alive all the time.

As a potential customer I looked into these, but products were few and far between. More importantly, they weren’t competitive with ordinary DRAM for either capacity or price.

The promise was that we would be plugging terabyte sized XPoint DIMMs into ordinary servers and getting massive capacity benefits at a small performance hit compared to DIMMs.

In practice the sizes available weren’t anywhere near that large and cost more.

So… what’s the point?

Despite me writing how Optane doesn't have a sustainable business case for 5+ years, It is still sad to see it being wind down. An interesting and cool tech.

It will be interesting to see if Samsung will discontinue its Z-NAND product lineup.

Related Discussion from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32270584

I'm sad cuz I really believed and felt excited when working on them

Maybe it was too early for Optane and it'll come back later? I hope

Reply on news.ycombinator.com