Tuesday, February 8th 2022
Intel Optane not Popular with Customers, $600M Loss in 2020
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.
Sources:
Blocks and Files, via Tom's Hardware
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.
38 Comments on Intel Optane not Popular with Customers, $600M Loss in 2020
I think you meant 2022?
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)
Or vastly superior better AMD Ryzen 5000u series.
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?
www.techpowerup.com/277397/intel-discontinues-all-consumer-optane-only-ssd-products
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.
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.
The XPoint itself is pretty nice even if expensive.