The rugpull on Optane was incredibly frustrating. Intel developed a technology which made really meaningful improvements to workloads in an industry that is full of sticky late adopters (RDBMSes). They kept investing until the point where they had unequivocally made their point and the late adopters were just about getting it... and then killed it!
It's hard to understand how they could have played that particular hand more badly. Even a few years on, I'm missing Optane drives because there is still no functional alternative. If they just held out a bit longer, they would have created a set of enterprise customers who would still be buying the things in 2040.
It’s especially hard to understand because so much of their management had a degree which conferred a mastery of business administration. I mean, it’s almost like you could take any tenured software engineeer at the company, and they would have been in a better position to manage the company more effectively. That’s very surprising, and might suggest that people with MBAs are total idiots who understand everything through GRE-friendly analogy rather than, well, actually understanding anything.
They are a weird company. Their marketing people showed up and invested a significant amount into a buy of optane gear with our OEM a few months before they killed the product. They pulled the rug in themselves in addition to the customers.
> Even a few years on, I'm missing Optane drives because there is still no functional alternative...... they would have created a set of enterprise customers who would still be buying the things in 2040.
I guess many on HN are software developers looking at Optane.
In reality Optane was simply not cost effective. Optane came at a time when DRAM cost / GB was at its peak, the idea to developers could have slower DRAM that is non-volatile is great, until they realise slower DRAM causes CPU performance regression. Optane Memory, even on its roadmap in future product will always effectively be another layer between DRAM and NAND ( Storage ). And they could barely make profits when DRAM was at its peak. I dont think people realise there is near "4x" price difference between the height of DRAM price in ~2016 ish to ~2023.
In terms of Optane Storage, it was again at NAND's cost /GB peak and it was barely completing or making profits. Most would immediately point out it has lower latency and better QD1 performance. But Samsung showcased with Z-NAND, which is specifically tuned SLC NAND you can get close enough performance, far higher bandwidth and QD32 results, while using much lower power. And has a reliable Roadmap that is alongside the NAND development. Even Samsung stopped development of Z-NAND in 2023.
The truth is the market isn't interested in Optane enough at the price/ performance and feature it was offering. And Intel's execution for Optane, they have either over promised ( as they do in that era ) and fail to deliver on time or they are basically lying about the potential. And fail to bring down cost of fabbing it, which they blame Micron but in reality it is all on Intel.
The industry have also repeatedly stated they are not interested in a technology that is single sourced by either Intel or Micron. Unlike NAND and DRAM.
Intel was giving away Optane and pushing to Facebook and other Hyperscaler. But even then they couldn't even fill the minimum order for Micron and had to pay hundreds of millions per year for empty fabs.
One could see the death of Optane coming from a mile away. It was only kept afloat by Intel, and its main issue that is was really cool tech, but it was a solution looking for a problem.
You need scratch space that's resilient to a power outage? An NVDIMM is faster and cheaper. You need fast storage? Flash keeps getting faster and cheaper. Optane was squeezed from both sides and could never hope to generate the volume needed to cut costs.
So now imagine that you are at Intel deciding what initiatives to fund. The company is in trouble and needs to show some movement out of the red, preferably quickly. It also lost momentum and lost ground to competitors, so it needs to focus. What do you do? You kill all the side projects that will never make much money. And of course you kill a lot of innovation in the process, but how would you justify the alternative?
Isn’t NVMe disks basically same value as optane? Comments saying optane was amazing doesn’t make sense if NVMe is basically as good and there are other NVMe disk manufacturers
First, NVMe is a protocol to access block storage. It can be used to access any kind of block device, Optane, SSD, NVDIMM, virtual storage on EC2, etc. So it's true that the protocol is the same (well, not quite - more on this in a bit), but that's like saying a server is the same as an iPhone because they can both speak TCP/IP.
What was the "more in a bit" bit? Persistent memory (PMEM) devices like NVDIMMs and Optane can usually speak two protocols. They can either act as storage, or as memory expansion. But this memory also happens to be non-volatile.
This was sold as a revolution, but it turned out that it's not easy for current operating systems and applications to deal with memory with vastly different latencies. Also it turns out that software is buggy, and being able to lose state by rebooting is useful. And so Optane in memory mode never really caught on, and these devices were mostly used as a storage tier. However: look up MemVerge.
So you are right that it turned out to be a faster SSD, but the original promise was a lot more. And here comes the big problem: because Optane was envisioned as a separate kind of product between RAM and SSD, the big price differential could be justified. If it's just a faster SSD - well, the market has spoken.
It's hard to understand how they could have played that particular hand more badly. Even a few years on, I'm missing Optane drives because there is still no functional alternative. If they just held out a bit longer, they would have created a set of enterprise customers who would still be buying the things in 2040.