Why Intel killed its Optane memory business

The problem is that Optane wasn't better than the other NV-DIMMs that came to market. It's easy enough to build an NV-DIMM based on DRAM with some buffers that dumps to flash when the power fails, which ends up being cheaper and easier than Optane memory based DIMMs due to the required error correction and wear leveling.

It is quite likely that persistent memory will make its way into general purpose computers in the future, as the difficulty in scaling DRAM increases as cell sizes decrease. Capacitors can only be made so small before they don't store enough charge to overcome thermal noise. In theory Optane was supposed to be better at smaller feature sizes, but it never got to that point. We'll have to see if MRAM or NRAM can make it in the coming years.

By pricing 16GB Optane at 64-128GB NAND SSD level and calling it "cache". You can still buy them today at 256GB SSD price.

> 2017: The Optane Memory drives will be available to order on April 24th. A 16GB drive costs $44 while a 32GB drive costs $77

and that price never changed

SK Hynix, Micron, Western Digital, and Samsung were able to improve NAND/DRAM faster than Micron/Intel could bring the cost of 3DXP down. I don't know if I'd call that squandering a lead considering Micron never had a high volume product with it and Intel struggled with cost/performance in the products they did launch.

Intel and squandering resources like a corporate wastrel, name a more classic combination.