Intel Optane not Popular with Customers, $600M Loss in 2020

[TheLostSwede]

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.


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[Daven]

“As to if this trend continues in 2021…”

I think you meant 2022?

 

[Selaya]

doesn't make any sense. completely contradicts my observations (DC optanes flying off the shelves, being restocked at higher prices, still flying off the shelves - especially the newer 4x4 ones. and the used market for the older, 3x4 DCs isnt seeing any big dumps either. all that's being dumped are the now-discontinued consumer models, and only from some chinese vendors and in the US.)

i guess the volume's just not there to offset the initial investments in r&d (makes sense, they threw away the utah fab and had to start anew from scratch in NM for their 2nd gen, thats all costs costscostscostscosts)

 

[medi01]

On my company notebook it doesn't quite work. There are 1 in 3 chances that my notebook won't hibernate/sleep at all and instead will drain the battery and then do emergency shutdown. So, perhaps that?

Or vastly superior better AMD Ryzen 5000u series.

 

[TheLostSwede]

“As to if this trend continues in 2021…”

I think you meant 2022?

No, I meant continued, since the final financial figures for 2021 aren't out yet.
Thanks though, as it was a typo.

doesn't make any sense. completely contradicts my observations (DC optanes flying off the shelves, being restocked at higher prices, still flying off the shelves - especially the newer 4x4 ones. and the used market for the older, 3x4 DCs isnt seeing any big dumps either. all that's being dumped are the now-discontinued consumer models, and only from some chinese vendors and in the US.)

i guess the volume's just not there to offset the initial investments in r&d (makes sense, they threw away the utah fab and had to start anew from scratch in NM for their 2nd gen, thats all costs costscostscostscosts)

Normally you don't offset fab costs directly in relation to retail revenue though, right?
So this suggests sales are poor in general, but are you seeing this as a consumer, or as someone selling these products to companies building servers?

 

[Asni]

What does this survey even mean? Intel discontinued optane based consumer SSD several months ago.

Intel Discontinues All Consumer Optane-Only SSD Products

Intel has quietly announced the discontinuation of all Optane Memory SSDs for the consumer market. The company also confirmed that going forward they had no plans to release any new consumer Optane-Only SDDs. The Intel Optane Memory M10, 800P, 900P, and 905P series SSDs have now all been...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[WhitetailAni]

What does this survey even mean? Intel discontinued optane based consumer SSD several months ago.

Intel Discontinues All Consumer Optane-Only SSD Products

Intel has quietly announced the discontinuation of all Optane Memory SSDs for the consumer market. The company also confirmed that going forward they had no plans to release any new consumer Optane-Only SDDs. The Intel Optane Memory M10, 800P, 900P, and 905P series SSDs have now all been...

www.techpowerup.com

That was just for consumer Optane products, not all Optane products - enterprise or consumer.

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

What does this survey even mean? Intel discontinued optane based consumer SSD several months ago.

Intel Discontinues All Consumer Optane-Only SSD Products

Intel has quietly announced the discontinuation of all Optane Memory SSDs for the consumer market. The company also confirmed that going forward they had no plans to release any new consumer Optane-Only SDDs. The Intel Optane Memory M10, 800P, 900P, and 905P series SSDs have now all been...

www.techpowerup.com

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,

Reading helps.

 

[Asni]

Reading helps.

You didn't even read the sentence you highlighted: consumers are the target of this article, corporate and enterprise custumers just confirm the trend ("either").

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,

 

[TheLostSwede]

What does this survey even mean? Intel discontinued optane based consumer SSD several months ago.

Intel Discontinues All Consumer Optane-Only SSD Products

Intel has quietly announced the discontinuation of all Optane Memory SSDs for the consumer market. The company also confirmed that going forward they had no plans to release any new consumer Optane-Only SDDs. The Intel Optane Memory M10, 800P, 900P, and 905P series SSDs have now all been...

www.techpowerup.com

Survey? This is Intel's SEC filing, as in their revenue figures for the Optane business unit.

 

[Selaya]

No, I meant continued, since the final financial figures for 2021 aren't out yet.
Thanks though, as it was a typo.


Normally you don't offset fab costs directly in relation to retail revenue though, right?
So this suggests sales are poor in general, but are you seeing this as a consumer, or as someone selling these products to companies building servers?

consumer. ive been looking at maybe picking up one of the newer 4x4 optane ssds but they started out at like $1,000 for the smallest (400gb), sold out like instantly and are now at $1,500 and still sold out

 

[TheLostSwede]

consumer. ive been looking at maybe picking up one of the newer 4x4 optane ssds but they started out at like $1,000 for the smallest (400gb), sold out like instantly and are now at $1,500 and still sold out

Well, I guess people have money to burn and no GPU's to buy

 

[Assimilator]

Optane is a good preview of how Arc is going to end up.

 

[Dr_b_]

Its really good, but too expensive for consumers

 

[Lycanwolfen]

I just use PrimoCache where I have control over everything.

 

[OSdevr]

I got an optane to put my paging file on since it was cheaper than getting more RAM. Turns out Windows doesn't like the paging file on anything but the C drive :-/. Would've been great if not for the BSODs.

 

[mak1skav]

I got an optane to put my paging file on since it was cheaper than getting more RAM. Turns out Windows doesn't like the paging file on anything but the C drive :-/. Would've been great if not for the BSODs.

That sounds odd I have set my paging file on other drive than C: for the several past years without any problems. I have used that setup on Windows 7 and now on Windows 10 without any problems.

 

[OSdevr]

That sounds odd I have set my paging file on other drive than C: for the several past years without any problems. I have used that setup on Windows 7 and now on Windows 10 without any problems.

Interesting, I even exchanged my optane for a new one thinking it was defective but I had the same problem.

 

[Solaris17]

Man its a real shame to. We use this on big production systems for VMs and for standalone bare metal that has massive DBs and its really hard to beat. Its understandable though, its way to expensive for consumers as a whole.

As for corporate space, eh I kind of see why. The DC grade drives come in PCI-e card format and any that dont arent high density enough. 19" rack chassis get as small as 1u in height for high density racks and usually already need 10G nics added for throughput. this leaves almost no room for another add-on card unless the board comes with 10g nics already.

 

[Selaya]

they dropped those aic optanes tho, the 2nd gen (p5800x) is purely u.2 (4x4), and comes in 400, 800 and 1,600 gb flavors

 

[BArms]

Optane's highly restrictive use cases made it effectively a solution in search of a problem. Maybe they should license it to SSD makers to make a kind of hybrid drive, 2TB NVME SSD with 128GB Optane cache might actually make more sense than what Intel has tried doing with it.

 

[Dr_b_]

they dropped those aic optanes tho, the 2nd gen (p5800x) is purely u.2 (4x4), and comes in 400, 800 and 1,600 gb flavors

One or a few of those 1.6TB p5800x would be really awesome to have, but i'd rather pay my mortgage for the rest of the year. Also, it should be available in PCIe format, more convenient.

 

[Assimilator]

Optane's highly restrictive use cases made it effectively a solution in search of a problem. Maybe they should license it to SSD makers to make a kind of hybrid drive, 2TB NVME SSD with 128GB Optane cache might actually make more sense than what Intel has tried doing with it.

Intel's management hates licensing their tech to third parties... especially when that would obviously make the most sense. They'd rather sit on their IP and make no money from it than - gasp horror! - allow dirty plebeians to make good use of said IP.

 

[dragontamer5788]

Intel's management hates licensing their tech to third parties... especially when that would obviously make the most sense. They'd rather sit on their IP and make no money from it than - gasp horror! - allow dirty plebeians to make good use of said IP.

Micron was literally a different fab trying to make use of this tech.

Intel didn't enter this technology alone, they were a good business partner. But Optane overpromised and underdelivered. It seems like most people interested in this space was more than willing to buy 2TB DDR4 all-memory databases instead of wait around for an Optane solution.

The issue might be one of Intel engineering talent. I don't know if better engineers could have made the original promises possible... but maybe better engineers would have better predicted the promise of the technology. Or maybe marketing got ahead of engineering. Who knows? The ultimate problem was once again: overpromising and underdelivering. To truly compete against a 2TB DDR4 server, this 3D XPoint / Optane stuff really needed to be cheaper and easier to use.

 

[watzupken]

It is a shame in my opinion. Optane seems like a great replacement for NAND based SSDs as it improved access speed/ responsiveness, and not just focusing on fluffy sequential speed improvement which don't benefit most consumers. There are problems with it, but I am not sure if Intel and Micron actually tried to improve the weaknesses of the product. Tying use of Optane to specific Intel based system did not help either.