Wednesday, March 17th 2021
Micron Abandons 3D XPoint Memory & Looks to Sell Factory
Micron and Intel started development on 3D XPoint memory technology back in 2012 and by 2015 Intel had announced their Optane branded lineup of storage products featuring the new memory. Micron estimated that the chips would be sold for half the price of DRAM but five times the cost of flash memory and started limited manufacturing at a jointly owned factory in Lehi, Utah. The new technology was proposed as the future of memory but with Intel being the only major manufacturer of products that dream has not been realized. While the Intel Optane lineup of products has been generally well-received the high-cost and limited use cases have limited its adoption.
Micron has been dissolving its partnership with Intel over the years with their joint 3D XPoint development program ending in 2019 and Micron exercising their right to acquire Intel's share of the factory. This left Intel in the position of purchasing 3D XPoint wafers from Micron for use in their Optane products however this wasn't enough to fully utilize the facilities production and as such Micron has consistently been losing money on the factory. Micron has decided to sell the factory and is now in discussions with potential buyers the most likely being Intel to take over the facility. Intel has announced that their strategy for Optane products will remain the same and that supply will continue.
Source:
Micron
Micron has been dissolving its partnership with Intel over the years with their joint 3D XPoint development program ending in 2019 and Micron exercising their right to acquire Intel's share of the factory. This left Intel in the position of purchasing 3D XPoint wafers from Micron for use in their Optane products however this wasn't enough to fully utilize the facilities production and as such Micron has consistently been losing money on the factory. Micron has decided to sell the factory and is now in discussions with potential buyers the most likely being Intel to take over the facility. Intel has announced that their strategy for Optane products will remain the same and that supply will continue.
11 Comments on Micron Abandons 3D XPoint Memory & Looks to Sell Factory
Hopefully someone will be able to resurrect this once patents expire.
I don't believe 3DXPoint's failed, Intel just released their second generation which is priced all the way to the fucking Mars and yet it is already extinct - given the price point it is only really attractive for a very specific use case (database servers basically), but when it is, it is actually a very useful tech (still way cheaper than SDRAM on a per-GB/TB basis).
It's just that Micron never really managed to make anything out of it which is kind of a shame. Presumably Intel will just buy Micron out at this point.
That said, I'm surprised Micron never produced 3DXpoint products for the larger masses; NVIDIA, AMD, and ARM surely could have benefitted from the hybrid nature of the modules, especially for big commercial and corporate enterprises. 3D XPoint would have also been useful on the Epyc and TR platforms for certain use cases.
Either way, this is moot, now that the factory is being sold off because of lack of orders.
Optane Persistent Memory (DIMM modules, byte-addresable) is another story, it only works with Xeons (and only on motherboards that come from the same Intel).