Tuesday, July 4th 2023

Intel Optane Still not Dead, Orders Expanded by Another Quarter

In July 2022, Intel announced that the company was winding down its Optane division, effectively discontinuing the development of 3D XPoint memory that it has been marketing for a long time. Once viewed as a competitive advantage, the support for Optane has been removed from future platforms. However, Intel has announced plans to extend Optane shipments by another quarter amidst additional stock or significant demand from customers buying Optane DIMMs for their enterprises. Initially set to ship the final Optane Persistent Memory 100-series DIMMs on September 30, Intel extends this date by three months to December 29, 2023.

Intel states, "Customers are recommended to secure additional Optane units at the specified 0.44% annualized failure rate (AFR) for safety stock. Intel will make commercially reasonable efforts to support last time order quantities for Intel Optane Persistent Memory 100 Series."
Source: Tom's Hardware
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19 Comments on Intel Optane Still not Dead, Orders Expanded by Another Quarter

#1
Daven
I guess the warehouse workers found one last box of optane SSDs that didnt make it into the dumpster.
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#2
dj-electric
DavenI guess the warehouse workers found one last box of optane SSDs that didnt make it into the dumpster.
I'm going to go ahead and claim that the association to optane cache, which is a completely different product btw, is a part of why Optane died.
No, this isn't Optane cache SSDs, read the article, slowly.
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#3
Daven
dj-electricI'm going to go ahead and claim that the association to optane cache, which is a completely different product btw, is a part of why Optane died.
No, this isn't Optane cache SSDs, read the article, slowly.
Ok fine,

I guess the warehouse workers found one last box of optane CACHE that didnt make it into the dumpster.

Happy?
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#4
ymdhis
Are these compatible with Itanium servers?
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#5
Daven
ymdhisAre these compatible with Itanium servers?
I think only Xeon Phi.
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#6
bug
dj-electricI'm going to go ahead and claim that the association to optane cache, which is a completely different product btw, is a part of why Optane died.
No, this isn't Optane cache SSDs, read the article, slowly.
Neah, my money's on a roadblock they hit (either RnD or manufacturing). They couldn't improve it or drive down costs fast enough and it didn't make sense to keep it alive. Makes me sad, I still drool over Optane's 4k random read numbers :(
Posted on Reply
#7
Wirko
bugNeah, my money's on a roadblock they hit (either RnD or manufacturing). They couldn't improve it or drive down costs fast enough and it didn't make sense to keep it alive.
That's what I think too - Intel and Micron never found a way to build tall stacks of those green and yellow bricks, so it was impossible to bring the cost down to near-NAND levels.
(And luckily, they also didn't find a way to compress many bits into one cell.)
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#8
dgianstefani
TPU Proofreader
I'm still hoping it's just shelved.

Nothing, even now in gen 5 fairyland, comes close to optane real world performance or even a 10th of the cell longevity. People focus on its caching or RAM replacement aspects but again, those were pushed for their value argument. Pure optane storage, used as normal or scratch drives are where its at.

I swear, the "good enough" attitude combined with marketing's successful efforts to get buyers focusing on irrelevant numbers (see: sequential performance) will be the death of the human race eventually.

Some ark spaceship is gonna fail because the cockpit dashboard uses 64 GB EMMC or something. Like when $100k teslas died for that reason.

I really need to get around to buying one of the large optane AIC new while they're still around.
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#9
bug
dgianstefaniI'm still hoping it's just shelved.

Nothing, even now in gen 5 fairyland, comes close to optane real world performance or even a 10th of the cell longevity. People focus on its caching or RAM replacement aspects but again, those were pushed for their value argument. Pure optane storage, used as normal or scratch drives are where its at.

I swear, the "good enough" attitude combined with marketing's successful efforts to get buyers focusing on irrelevant numbers (see: sequential performance) will be the death of the human race eventually.

Some ark spaceship is gonna fail because the cockpit dashboard uses 64 GB EMMC or something. Like when $100k teslas died for that reason.

I really need to get around to buying one of the large optane AIC new while they're still around.
Well, "good enough" is how natural selection works anyway. But stupidity (i.e. letting others decide what we should focus on) might just do the trick.

And yes, I'm 99% sure they don't just throw away the research, if some breakthrough presents itself, there may be another life for these. At the same time, Optane, take a number...
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#13
thestryker6
dgianstefaniI'm still hoping it's just shelved.

Nothing, even now in gen 5 fairyland, comes close to optane real world performance or even a 10th of the cell longevity. People focus on its caching or RAM replacement aspects but again, those were pushed for their value argument. Pure optane storage, used as normal or scratch drives are where its at.

I swear, the "good enough" attitude combined with marketing's successful efforts to get buyers focusing on irrelevant numbers (see: sequential performance) will be the death of the human race eventually.

Some ark spaceship is gonna fail because the cockpit dashboard uses 64 GB EMMC or something. Like when $100k teslas died for that reason.

I really need to get around to buying one of the large optane AIC new while they're still around.
Honestly it seemed to me that the focus on expanding DRAM capacity is what doomed the product. Intel didn't seem to expect DDR4 capacity to skyrocket like it did which meant they weren't able to give more capacity just a slightly lower cost. The caching seemed to be a way to largely offset performance of HDDs which rapidly became obsolete in client computing due to NAND pricing tanking. They didn't integrate caching + NAND until a fair bit later (I want to say they only had 2 generations of these products).

The small Optane drives are fantastic for ZFS (I might have 6 of them in my server box), and probably if you use third party caching software to make tiers on Windows. The storage drives are absolutely fantastic and I'm still kicking around getting one of the first gen ones, but I don't have a current need and would prefer PCIe 4.0 but can't justify P5800X cost. It seems like they were stuck between a rock and a hard place pricing wise where they couldn't get it low enough for consumer without damaging enterprise sales. They also never seemed to advertise the storage aspect despite them being the best drives on the market.

I really hope it makes a return or something equivalent comes along because NAND is not the technology we should be relying on for storage.
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#14
Frank_100
Still waiting on HP and the memristors.
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#15
Scrizz
thestryker6... NAND is not the technology we should be relying on for storage.
100% QFT
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#16
unwind-protect
Remind me which generations of Xeons supported these? I think from v5 on.
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#17
thestryker6
unwind-protectRemind me which generations of Xeons supported these? I think from v5 on.
Second Gen Scalable (Cascade Lake) so that would correspond to 10th Gen desktop.
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