Optane was an interesting solution that was still looking for a question. One of the things that drove mass SSD adoption was the experience was plainly better. Even the most illiterate user could see how fucking fast an SSD machine booted and how much more responsive they were.<p>SSD to Optane? There's no practical difference. The high end desktop users and serious gamers that have serious cash for their rigs turned up their noses at Optane because it turns out SSD sequential read was good enough for most use cases. At least good enough to not pay 3x more per GB. Nobody really cared about insane sustained write speed when the SLC caches did almost as well in most use cases. Plus as the interfaces scaled up, plain old NAND drives were ready to flood the bus with as much sequential read bandwidth that the bus would take.<p>What could have saved it? I dunno. If Intel wanted to be anti-competitive they could have slapped on 8 PCIe lanes direct to the CPU exclusively for Optane on their desktop products. As we've found out, 4 lanes of NVMe to the CPU and the rest having to go through the chipset is some sort of unfunny, market segmentation joke. It could have forced high end users to grudgingly accept Optane as the path to the absolute best I/O and an actual, tangible difference in performance.
Surprised that there was not even a single mention of Micron! My understanding is that it was a joint venture of some variety between Intel and Micron.<p>I'm sad to see Optane being discontinued. I had very good performance results with it being incorporated into SDS cluster architectures.
Low latency optane ssd's are incredible for so many reasons - really hope those don't become discontinued as well :(<p>Many here seem to miss how deeply complex SSD's are and how truly different optane is from most consumer and enterprise SSD offerings. Most consumer ssd's only optimize for sequential reads and writes and at that max throughput, not latency for random access. Glossing over a lot of detail, but this is where optane truly shines.
It was never just about Optane. The joint Micron/Intel 3DXPoint technology was meant to be a new type of non-volatile memory who's performance was closer to memory than disk, leading to all sorts of revolutionary changes in the way memory was used.<p>The trouble is the performance goals were never realized, so the revolutionary non-volatile main memory use case was not realized. Optane/SSD-usage seems to have been an attempt to at least salvage something from the investment given that it was fast enough for that, but I suppose it the end it can't have been cost competitive with NAND-based SSDs. Perhaps the economy of scale would have been different if the technology had met it's performance goals and been more widely used ?
At least the PMDK (Persistent Memory Development Kit) code works interoperably with both Optane and CXL:<p><a href="https://github.com/pmem/pmdk" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pmem/pmdk</a>