Optane was crazy good tech, it way just too expensive at the time for mass adoption, but the benefits were so good.
Looking at those charts, besides the DWPD it feels like normal NVMe has mostly caught up. I occassionally wonder where a gen 7/8(?) optane would be today if it caught on, it'd probably be nuts.
hbogert 30 minutes ago [-]
It stands out, because it didn't sell. Which is weird because there were some pretty big pros about using them. The latency for updating 1 byte was crazy good. Some databases or journals for something like zfs really benefited from this.
ksec 7 minutes ago [-]
>Which is weird....
It isn't weird at all. I would be surprised if it ever succeed in the first place.
Cost was way too high. Intel not sharing the tech with others other than Micron. Micron wasn't committed to it either, and since unused capacity at the Fab was paid by Intel regardless they dont care. No long term solution or strategy to bring cost down. Neither Intel or Micron have a vision on this. No one wanted another Intel only tech lock in. And despite the high price, it barely made any profits per unit compared to NAND and DRAM which was at the time making historic high profits. Once the NAND and DRAM cycle went down again cost / performance on Optane wasn't as attractive. Samsung even made some form of SLC NAND that performs similar to Optane but cheaper, and even they end up stopped developing for it due to lack of interest.
bombcar 21 minutes ago [-]
It feels like everyone figured out what to do with them and how just about when they stopped making them.
timschmidt 12 minutes ago [-]
Same for the Larabee / Knights architecture. Would sure be fun to play around with a 500 core Knights CPU with a couple TB of optane for LLM inference.
Intel's got an amazing record of axing projects as soon as they've done the hard work of building an ecosystem.
zozbot234 8 minutes ago [-]
> 500 core
The newest fully E-core based Xeon CPUs have reached that figure by now, at least in dual-socket configs.
timschmidt 1 minutes ago [-]
Yup. And high end GPU compute now has on-package HBM like Knight's had a decade ago, and those new Intel CPUs are finally shipping with AVX reliably again. We lost a decade for workloads that would benefit from both.
zozbot234 11 minutes ago [-]
Optane didn't sell because they focused on their weird persistent DIMM sticks, which are a nightmare for enterprise where for many ordinary purposes you want ephemeral data that disappears as soon as you cut power. Thet should have focused on making ordinary storage and solving the interconnect bandwidth and latency problems differently, such as with more up-to-date PCIe standards.
epistasis 20 minutes ago [-]
When most people are running databases on AWS RDS, or on ridiculous EBS drives with insanely low throughput and latency, it makes sense to me.
There are very few applications that benefit from such low latency, and if one has to go off the standard path of easy, but slow and expensive and automatically backup up, people will pick the ease.
Having the best technology performance is not enough to have product market fit. The execution required from the side of executives at Intel is far far beyond their capability. They developed a platform and wanted others to do the work of building all the applications. Without that starting killer app, there's not enough adoption to build an ecosystem.
p-e-w 20 minutes ago [-]
Optane was a victim of its own hype, such as “entirely new physics”, or “as fast as RAM, but persistent”. The reality felt like a failure afterwards even though it was still revolutionary, objectively speaking.
amelius 28 minutes ago [-]
For a good technical explanation at the physical level of a memory cell:
In an era of RAM shortages and quarterly price increases, Optane remains viable for swap and CPU/GPU cache.
trollbridge 15 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, I've wondered if we might see a revival of this kind of technology.
newsclues 11 minutes ago [-]
in an era of shortages, if there was an optane factory today ready to print money...
ece 6 minutes ago [-]
Fabs are expensive and all, but maybe running a right-sized fab could have still been profitable at making optane for low-latency work that it was so good at. Even moreso with ram prices as they are.
FpUser 25 minutes ago [-]
I feel sorry about the situation. From my perspective Optane was a godsend for databases. I was contemplating building a system. Could've been a pinnacle of vertical scalability for cheap.
22 minutes ago [-]
temptemptemp111 37 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 16:15:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Looking at those charts, besides the DWPD it feels like normal NVMe has mostly caught up. I occassionally wonder where a gen 7/8(?) optane would be today if it caught on, it'd probably be nuts.
It isn't weird at all. I would be surprised if it ever succeed in the first place.
Cost was way too high. Intel not sharing the tech with others other than Micron. Micron wasn't committed to it either, and since unused capacity at the Fab was paid by Intel regardless they dont care. No long term solution or strategy to bring cost down. Neither Intel or Micron have a vision on this. No one wanted another Intel only tech lock in. And despite the high price, it barely made any profits per unit compared to NAND and DRAM which was at the time making historic high profits. Once the NAND and DRAM cycle went down again cost / performance on Optane wasn't as attractive. Samsung even made some form of SLC NAND that performs similar to Optane but cheaper, and even they end up stopped developing for it due to lack of interest.
Intel's got an amazing record of axing projects as soon as they've done the hard work of building an ecosystem.
The newest fully E-core based Xeon CPUs have reached that figure by now, at least in dual-socket configs.
There are very few applications that benefit from such low latency, and if one has to go off the standard path of easy, but slow and expensive and automatically backup up, people will pick the ease.
Having the best technology performance is not enough to have product market fit. The execution required from the side of executives at Intel is far far beyond their capability. They developed a platform and wanted others to do the work of building all the applications. Without that starting killer app, there's not enough adoption to build an ecosystem.
https://pcper.com/2017/06/how-3d-xpoint-phase-change-memory-...
In an era of RAM shortages and quarterly price increases, Optane remains viable for swap and CPU/GPU cache.