Tuesday, February 8th 2022
Intel Optane not Popular with Customers, $600M Loss in 2020
Despite its technical advantages over NAND flash, Intel's Optane memory technology never really took off in the consumer space, largely due to its much higher costs. Based on details from Intel's SEC filings, it would appear that its corporate customers haven't been overly impressed either, as Intel filed a US$576 million loss in 2020 with regards to its Optane business.
As to if this trend continued in 2021, we're going to have to wait and see, but it looks like the losses are set to continue based on its revenue figures, according to Blocks and Files. With this in mind, it seems like Micron's exit from 3D XPoint memory isn't so hard to understand, as the technology is clearly too costly to make up for the benefits on offer, for most of its potential customer base. Transitions to higher-density 3D XPoint memory has also been slow, which might be yet another reason customers have shied away from using it, even as a caching solution in storage servers. It wouldn't surprise us if Intel moves on from Optane/3D XPoint memory in the near future, as the company seems to have shifted its focus firmly away from storage solutions.
Sources:
Blocks and Files, via Tom's Hardware
As to if this trend continued in 2021, we're going to have to wait and see, but it looks like the losses are set to continue based on its revenue figures, according to Blocks and Files. With this in mind, it seems like Micron's exit from 3D XPoint memory isn't so hard to understand, as the technology is clearly too costly to make up for the benefits on offer, for most of its potential customer base. Transitions to higher-density 3D XPoint memory has also been slow, which might be yet another reason customers have shied away from using it, even as a caching solution in storage servers. It wouldn't surprise us if Intel moves on from Optane/3D XPoint memory in the near future, as the company seems to have shifted its focus firmly away from storage solutions.
38 Comments on Intel Optane not Popular with Customers, $600M Loss in 2020
they performed as you would expect them to, overheat city
Because mostly RAM is significantly cheaper to add. And much easier to source unlike Optane that seems Unobtanium most of the time.
There were high RAM prices a few years back. If you bought Optane then, then i would understand it being cheaper.They tried to make Hybrids. H10 or what it was called. Did not take off. I agree that they should licence it out.I especially like the fact that unlike NAND that needs parrallelism to perform best Optane does not care. 100GB is as fast as 1.6TB. Where as with NAND 100GB would be dog slow.
Also much better 4K r/w than NAND. Couple that with insane durability and it's pretty great. Except Intel never licened it out. Produces low volume and thus prices remain high and market penetration remains low.
Also, it needs to be somewhat universal, again Optane is everything but that.I recall them releasing the capability on chipsets rather selectively, trying to inflate the necessity for HEDT segment versus the early Threadrippers at the time.
Man did they misfire there, they could have captured the consumer gamur market looking at the last 1% of FPS.Hey, Raja said they have a chip!
What was/is restricted are use cases that do depend on CPU/platform:
- If you wanted to use the initially small Optane drive for SSD caching, that obviously was restricted to some Intel systems.
- Hybrid drives like H10 were restricted to some Intel systems for similar reasons. IIRC AMD drives saw one or the other drive, sometimes both, depending on how firmware/UEFI handled the situation.
- Optane DIMMs were obviously restricted to some Xeons.