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

[londiste]

Intel has made some really strange decisions about the controllers, channels and PCI-e layouts. Maybe understandable choices but still. Even semi-consumer directed options were kind of weird and power or space limitations never allowed them to follow the trends of NAND Flash competitors - things like now-ubiquitous 2280 M.2.

The XPoint itself is pretty nice even if expensive.

 

[Selaya]

Actually there's 22110 and 2280 m.2 versions of Optane (both consumer- and enterprise-branded ones, first gen)
they performed as you would expect them to, overheat city

 

[R0H1T]

Intel and Micron actually tried to improve the weaknesses of the product

The only real weakness, if you could call it that, was the price & they obviously didn't get that down enough.

 

[chrcoluk]

The advantages just were not mind blowing to justify the cost in my opinion.

 

[Frank_100]

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.

This^^^^^

 

[Tomorrow]

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

I believe this is not due to demand but due to very limited production capacity. Intel makes Optane only in a single fab so the output can't be that high and has to be split between all Optane branded products.

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

Well thankfully Intel had the common sense to open up Arc to AIB's to produce too. If they had done the same for Optane then we would not have this bad news now.

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

Might be Optane specific problem. That is why most people who even have secondary PF's on other drives (also a minority) might have not noticed this. But i do wonder when did you buy your Optane that it was cheaper than RAM?
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.

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.

They tried to make Hybrids. H10 or what it was called. Did not take off. I agree that they should licence it out.

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.

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.

 

[azrael]

Correct me if I'm wrong (and I certainly might be since I haven't followed this closely), but weren't at least consumer Optane drives locked to other Intel tech. I vaguely remember something about them needing the use of Intel chipsets and/or processors. Considering the technology is already as expensive as it is, it really doesn't make sense to (artificially) limit its use further. Alas, at this time it's probably a moot point.

 

[Tomorrow]

Correct me if I'm wrong (and I certainly might be since I haven't followed this closely), but weren't at least consumer Optane drives locked to other Intel tech. I vaguely remember something about them needing the use of Intel chipsets and/or processors. Considering the technology is already as expensive as it is, it really doesn't make sense to (artificially) limit its use further. Alas, at this time it's probably a moot point.

I cant speak for the hybrid drives used in laptops but as far as desktop/DIY im not aware of any restriction on using Optane as system or data drives on AMD systems.

 

[Selaya]

[ ... ]

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.

not entirely true. the 100gb optanes have lower sustained write performance (everything else's the same tho)

 

[Tomorrow]

not entirely true. the 100gb optanes have lower sustained write performance (everything else's the same tho)

By a margin of 200MB/s to 1500MB/s depending on the model. So yes i stand corrected.

 

[Selaya]

actually i have a 100gb optane which has basically halfed sequential write performance (compared to a 280gb one, or something which has full performance)

 

[Vayra86]

Well in the end this is storage and we want it to not cost a whole lot. Its one of the key concerns and Optane fails big time at it.

Also, it needs to be somewhat universal, again Optane is everything but that.

I cant speak for the hybrid drives used in laptops but as far as desktop/DIY im not aware of any restriction on using Optane as system or data drives on AMD systems.

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.

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

Hey, Raja said they have a chip!

 

[londiste]

There were no restrictions on using Optane drives as data drives on AMD systems. Or HEDT vs desktop.

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.

 

[Assimilator]

There were no restrictions on using Optane drives as data drives on AMD systems. Or HEDT vs desktop.

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.

Wasn't RAID with Optane also limited to the X-series (HEDT) chipsets?