I'd like to express my thoughts on this, from business exec point of view.
Consumer-grade Optane SSDs are not competetive with flash memory, simple as that. On performance and write endurance, flash-based SSD are "good enough", while also much better on cost-per-GB vs Optane. This reduces available market for Optane to gaming enthusiasts and similar customers - a very small slice of the total PC market.
Now, for enterprise markets, best-in-class performance is always in demand, and the product can be (over)priced much higher than on the PC market.
Therefore, it makes total sense to make this move.
Are gaming enthusiasts a small market (in dollar terms)? I think the move is probably somewhat reasonable in terms of cutting costs, but I wonder why they didn't just license the technology to someone with experience selling to gamers (e.g. Corsair).
>Are gaming enthusiasts a small market (in dollar terms)?
It is not, the problem is I have yet to see any evidence of benefits. Most consumer and Gaming are Seq Read, which is something modern SSD actually does better than Optane. So Despite Optane having 10x faster Random Read at Queue 1, there are barely any measurable differences in gaming load time or frame rates.
Most games are still optimized for hard disks, sometimes duplicating assets multiple times to sequentially read them when necessary.
The latest consoles have SSDs+APIs that outclass anything available on PC today, so you might see fast NVMe SSDs as a requirement in the future. Even then, games will be optimized for the latency of SSDs, not Optane.
It made more sense a few years ago when they were only 2-3 times more expensive than flash. IDK if they could have predicted flash prices plummeting like they have, but for sure there's no worthwhile consumer reason to buy one now.
BTW, I don't think they ever made much difference in gaming. My understanding is that they were optimized for database like workloads, where you get lots of small disparate writes.
They also make glorious boot/OS drives. Those typically see a heavy mix of reads and writes, which is where Optane's dominance over NAND is strongest. The 900P/905P was pretty much the absolute best C: drive money could buy.
But does that make a noticeable difference? I think a consumer SSD like the samsung 970 EVO PLUS has over 500k IOPS. Would you shave more than milliseconds from the boot time by going higher?
IOPS is measuring throughput for parallel operations.
Optane SSDs have extremely low latency, which is critical for sequential operations.
Most operating systems have long phases of largely single-threaded synchronous I/O, or nearly so. They certainly can't maintain queue depth required to even approach 500K IOPS.
At queue depth 1 the 980 pro delivers 20k reads per second / 45k writes per second. That still sounds like a huge amount. Optane is faster, but is it enough to matter outside some extremely demanding niches?
The other reason Optane excels is latency. This is why single-threaded use cases, like system boot, love it.
IOPS do not tell the whole story here. Consider disk A, at 1M IOPS, against disk B, at 1k IOPS. Suppose the workload is light, at only 500 IOPS, which are "small" enough to service quickly. Which disk is higher performing?
You might say they're both capable of the task, so just get the cheaper one. This is wrong. Assume, for sake of a simple argument, that disk A can respond in 1us to these requests, and disk B in 1ms. That is, they'd be able to hit "max IOPS" on these requests, if only you have enough. Then disk A services the whole thing in 500us per second, or 0.05% used, and disk B in 500ms per second, or 50% used.
So disk A is in fact actually 1000x faster, if you're waiting on its result. Which, for single-threaded operations, you often are. If you're instead optimizing for throughput, you don't care.
Either point of view can be correct, at different times or for different systems. Ignorance that both points of view exist is how things like bufferbloat are everywhere now.
It's not an "other reason". IO operations at queue depth 1 are a direct measurement of latency. Queue depth 1 is not about throughput at all.
> Suppose the workload is light, at only 500 IOPS, which are "small" enough to service quickly.
I will assume the workload is light in CPU too, since spending half the time waiting for the disk is apparently not an instant disqualification.
> So disk A is in fact actually 1000x faster, if you're waiting on its result. Which, for single-threaded operations, you often are. If you're instead optimizing for throughput, you don't care.
If you're waiting on a bunch of results and disk A gets them to you significantly faster, it sounds like your initial premise of "only 500 IOPS" was wrong or misleading.
If you have a response time you want to meet, then you should measure IOPS with a sliding window of that many milliseconds. If it's still 500 at most, then disk B will still be fine for meeting your target.
If it turns out that "500" actually comes in bursts of 50 operations, and you want to be done in 10 milliseconds, then you should label your workload as "5k IOPS". Put in a drive that does at least 10k and you'll see all calculations done in under a frame; basically perfect latency. A drive a million times faster would have no practical difference.
IOPS are actually meaningless assuming conventional filesystem APIs. In the context of those APIs, IOPS are just a different way of writing MB/s except you get to show off that your block sizes are smaller.
Latency is a much bigger factor with conventional filesystem APIs. If you had fully async filesystem APIs that read offset x1 on file f1, offset x1 on file2, offset x100 on file f100 all at the same time then you would see linear scaling and the difference between Optane and NAND would grow smaller. However, that would require learning a new and much harder paradigm (you now have to be aware of parallelism inside SSDs). Optane is a simple upgrade that requires no software changes.
Genuinely curious, are disk writes a big part of booting? I'd imagine it to be mostly large sequential reads. Especially since operating systems have a long history of booting from HDD and still need reasonable support for that, I wouldn't expect the boot process has a whole lot of disk thrashing. I also can't think of a reason why it would need to.
Preface: My experience is primarily on Windows (required for, among others, crappy enterprise CAD software). Linux is probably different.
Most developer workstations have had SSDs for many years. This applies to the Windows 10 developers, too. So they haven't paid any real attention to performance regressions on HDDs, since it still works. It's just slow. But it's a HDD so who cares?
That means there's now a lot of I/O going on before and after login, more than would have ever been tolerated in the "old days". Yes, initial boot is just streaming reads, that's easy. But once the OS gets going, it starts logging things... writing. Or finishing up the dregs of the last system update. And NAND SSDs do not handle that mix well at all. They do extremely well with all-reads and very well with all-writes, but a mix will bog them down (block granularity? I don't know why).
Optane doesn't do that. It doesn't care about reads versus writes, or small writes between larger reads. It just goes, and it responds fast no matter what the mix.
It's not really the sort of thing where you notice "wow, this is so fast". It's the sort of thing where you notice randomly sometime that "hey, I've never actually had to wait for this disk". It's harder to notice the absence of pain compared to the pain itself. With Optane, something else is always the bottleneck.
It's not a huge effect, but it was pretty easy to justify the smaller price premium for Optane a few years ago when it was introduced. I fully expected it would carve out a bigger niche for itself at the top of the performance market -- because it really is the top, ahead of anything NAND -- but that hasn't happened. More Intel failings, I guess.
That's my point in the other post. Is that 1 second boot time gain really worth the money? Not arguing against it for heavy duty enterprise workloads. But as a consumer, at one point the extra performance is wasted on them.
Sure, but if you're a power user with deep pockets, you may still be interested. But you'll want to know whether you can something tangible out of it on your workstation, and it's not exclusively a multitenant cloud database optimizer (or worse, a regression for typical workstation workload performance).
So, the Windows boot speed comparison provides an indication that it'll give some benefit to personal workstations too. Whether it's worth it or not is another question entirely.
Not writes at boot, but the common bottleneck on desktop storage is usually low queue depth IO, which is where Optane excels.
It's not an abundantly high throughput device like NVMe, but for ZIL/SLOG and other caching where it's more about volume of tiny transactions, Optane is very useful.
Of course in enterprise you'd just buy a PCIe card with the characteristics your workloads require which makes Optane very "prosumer", so I understand why Intel would axe the line.
This depends a lot on the operating system and on how it is configured.
On my Gentoo Linux, there are absolutely no writes during booting.
On the other hand, for my job, I have installed Windows 10 Enterprise on several kinds of embedded computers.
Some of those computers used some ancient model of Transcend SATA SSDs, which had an extremely low writing speed, of only around 40 Mbyte/s, much like a memory card (and not like a good one).
After the default installation of Windows 10, the booting was unbelievably slow, it could take maybe a half hour or so. When Windows 10 decided that it must install updates, it was much worse. The computer became available after booting only after a few hours.
I had to waste a few days with the unhelpful Windows Knowledge Base and with some more helpful Internet forums, until I discovered how to shut down all the Windows services that wanted to write to the SSD during booting, so that eventually the booting time of Windows reached an acceptable value of less than a minute.
On the same hardware Linux booted almost instantly, because the SSD reading speed was decent, unlike its writing speed.
There are Linux distributions that I do not use, e.g. Ubuntu, and I would not be surprised if those also come with default configurations that attempt to write during booting, e.g. for updating file indexing databases, or other such crap.
For anyone curious, UserBenchmark is a pretty good resource to compare different drives - here's the 900P up against Samsung 980 Pro, both best-in-class.
I don't think it's wise from a long term public good/civic good point of view for consumers to give any sort of apologetic consideration to the business reasons for consumer unfriendly moves.
The moment capitalism becomes an excuse for capitalism crony capitalism becomes inevitable.
The evils of market segmentation and to a broader degree "value-add" should not be legitimized.
Capitalism is neither good or evil, it is a neutral force that can be leveraged for both. I don't want to offer excuses, but rather find explanations. Imagine you are the CEO of Intel (or VP of that business unit) - what would you do in their shoes?
NVME also wasn't as widespread as it is now, 3 years ago, when Optane was launching.
An enterprise grade NVME SSD closed that gap significantly with Optane drives, compared to regular SATA III SSDs.
Also, SSD flash controllers are now mature enough to the point where you can just throw a ton of low-grade flash at it, and have very respectable performance.
From a large-scale purchasing and architectural roadmap point of view, this tells me they won’t enjoy the economies of scale that flash enjoys, and the enterprise drives will be dead in a few years.
Either that, or they’re transitioning to offer consumer grade NVDIMMs, but the hardware APIs for those are really difficult to take advantage of for general purpose compute.
> From a large-scale purchasing and architectural roadmap point of view, this tells me they won’t enjoy the economies of scale that flash enjoys, and the enterprise drives will be dead in a few years.
I think a lot of OEMs and users quickly figured out that a 128Tb m.2 SSD wasn't much more than a 32gb Optane module cost-wise, at which point you can have your whole boot drive and more on an SSD.
I'm not certain whether enterprise drives will die off as quickly, I suppose it depends on market trends. One marketed plus of 3D XPoint technology was far better write endurance and lack of need for garbage collection. If a data center has a lot of rolling data to process it might not be a bad fit.
So if I am a professional, I am no longer good enough for Intel to buy this product? Optane gives insane compilation speed boost when you store large codebases on it.
Now only big corporations will be able to get competitive advantage over smaller businesses not being able to afford enterprise deal with Intel. I think something like that should be illegal.
Sounds like 3d-xpoint is not going to live up to its potential. Which is sad, because if it received the same R&D and manufacturing budget that NAND flash does, it could have really been something.
It's tough to break into an established market with a new technology. Battery tech also suffers from this problem. It's hard to challenge Li Ion now, even if you have something theoretically better. The manufacturing advantage is just too strong.
Sad but not surprised. Optane was simply too expensive for consumer market.
I was really excited by its 2nd Gen though [1], much closer to what Intel originally promised with Optane. And Read Write Speed that finally rivals other SSDs. I was hoping they would release a Consumer versions so we could do a benchmark against other PCI-E 4.0 SSD so we could finally settle the false assumption that Random Read is everything.
I'll miss it - we have a Virtualized Windows 2019 Server on it that reboots in 9 seconds. We set it to auto login and it's at the full in the desktop and ready to go.
Hopefully Micron will introduce an equivalent version.
Surprised Optane would help that. I would figure boot would be mostly large reads, minimal writes, which flash would do just as well or better, especially on PCIe 4.0.
Having it on a VM host bypasses a lot of bios delay.
Optane, at the time we bought it, was significantly faster than any consumer SSD.
With a Windows 10 install mounted on the Optane and installing it to a Optane hosted VM, the install takes four minutes if you have that file that answers the quetions Windows needs to install.
Typical intel move. They start something and then kill it shortly after if the new product did not have the massive impact they hoped for. I would not be surprised if they kill the optane enterprise products or simply dont develop a new version and some improvements in ssds will make optane not very interesting as it would not be much better but dramatically more expensive.
If something doesn’t have the business impact a company hopes, it seems perfectly reasonable to kill it. Focus matters. Messaging matters. If a sub-market is break-even or only slightly profitable, get out of it.
For a customer heavily invested in this new tech it's not great. Those will complain all over. It will hurt customer confidence in the long term. Meaning your new products have even less chance at mass adoption even if they're really good. Customers appreciate when you stand behind your products.
Consider companies like Google that are well known for shutting down services. And they're usually free, yet still people are now more hesitant to put their stuff in it.
Not permitting several weeks’ notice for a “last time buy” is crappy, though that’s fairly unusual and not a well understood action in the consumer segment as compared to enterprise, so I’m not sure that you or I could personally have gotten any in any meaningful way. They’re still available in-channel (NewEgg and Dell both have them at normal-seeming prices) right now for consumers who need them, which is effectively a “last time buy” in the consumer segment. I’d be surprised if Dell was not given a last-time buy notice.
I’m not nearly as convinced that “Intel once stopped selling Optane drives for consumers; you can’t trust them” is anywhere near as likely (nor valid) as “Intel has made major mis-steps in microcode resulting in serious degradation of performance after the sale for mitigations, seems to be struggling with their next process step change, and is facing major pressures now not just from AMD but now from ARM and Apple”.
In some sense the Optane decision is like the Google one. “Should I bet something important on this technology that isn’t making the company any money?” is a very fair question to ask.
seems to be the way tech at large exists & is done today. business as usual, with only massive colossal megaflare disruption bothering to register for anyone. so so so many wonderful potentials for humanity that were doing great things for some, but which hadn't seen rapid drastic shirt term adoption. terrible way to doom a species, imo. feels like there's few sympathetic voices here on HN, few who recognize this particular loss, & the meaning of long term & harder struggles. very sad seeing such mentalities saturate the world.
really hard to hear this. the 905's were light years ahead of ssd's & priced accessible to consumers, if you didn't need a ton of space. optane floating off into strictly-very-serious-business pricing tiers is a big loss.
and. i hope to be able to buy big sticks of "ram" cheap because they're actually optane with ram cache...like maybe 256gb optane + 32gb ddr5...one day....
I believe they are chopping some segments within Intel to strategically play the next coming months with the release of their dedicated DX2 GPU (400-600$)by outsourcing its fab with either TSMC or Samsung...and they'll kill that also after a year, smh team blue cant catch a break these days.
Is the cache smart about prefetching related files to your current activity?
If not, it's so tiny that while it will give you amazing performance on disk and database benchmarks I'm not convinced it will be notably better than an SLC cache when doing anything else. And an SLC cache doesn't require an extra chip.
The drives with NAND and Optane are pretty bad products though, and Intel doesn't even attempt to sell them directly to consumers. They're basically the dumping grounds for leftover/low-grade QLC NAND and 3D XPoint chips.
They sold off the flash but not the Optane, yet it's the 100% Optane drives they cancel and not the drives that are 5% Optane. I don't see how this is expected.
The very HP Convertible I'm typing on has an Intel Optane drive in it.. for me, this really is the fastest computer I'll ever have, and it really is all downhill from here when this thing dies.
I really meant it, even if I was too grief stricken to express it better.
I'd like to express my thoughts on this, from business exec point of view.
Consumer-grade Optane SSDs are not competetive with flash memory, simple as that. On performance and write endurance, flash-based SSD are "good enough", while also much better on cost-per-GB vs Optane. This reduces available market for Optane to gaming enthusiasts and similar customers - a very small slice of the total PC market.
Now, for enterprise markets, best-in-class performance is always in demand, and the product can be (over)priced much higher than on the PC market.
Therefore, it makes total sense to make this move.
Are gaming enthusiasts a small market (in dollar terms)? I think the move is probably somewhat reasonable in terms of cutting costs, but I wonder why they didn't just license the technology to someone with experience selling to gamers (e.g. Corsair).
>Are gaming enthusiasts a small market (in dollar terms)?
It is not, the problem is I have yet to see any evidence of benefits. Most consumer and Gaming are Seq Read, which is something modern SSD actually does better than Optane. So Despite Optane having 10x faster Random Read at Queue 1, there are barely any measurable differences in gaming load time or frame rates.
PC gaming market is about the size of the console market.
But people who would buy special equipment that isn't price competitive with non-"gaming" alternatives is only a small portion of that.
Most games are still optimized for hard disks, sometimes duplicating assets multiple times to sequentially read them when necessary.
The latest consoles have SSDs+APIs that outclass anything available on PC today, so you might see fast NVMe SSDs as a requirement in the future. Even then, games will be optimized for the latency of SSDs, not Optane.
In short: No, that's not a market.
It made more sense a few years ago when they were only 2-3 times more expensive than flash. IDK if they could have predicted flash prices plummeting like they have, but for sure there's no worthwhile consumer reason to buy one now.
BTW, I don't think they ever made much difference in gaming. My understanding is that they were optimized for database like workloads, where you get lots of small disparate writes.
They also make glorious boot/OS drives. Those typically see a heavy mix of reads and writes, which is where Optane's dominance over NAND is strongest. The 900P/905P was pretty much the absolute best C: drive money could buy.
But does that make a noticeable difference? I think a consumer SSD like the samsung 970 EVO PLUS has over 500k IOPS. Would you shave more than milliseconds from the boot time by going higher?
IOPS is measuring throughput for parallel operations.
Optane SSDs have extremely low latency, which is critical for sequential operations.
Most operating systems have long phases of largely single-threaded synchronous I/O, or nearly so. They certainly can't maintain queue depth required to even approach 500K IOPS.
At queue depth 1 the 980 pro delivers 20k reads per second / 45k writes per second. That still sounds like a huge amount. Optane is faster, but is it enough to matter outside some extremely demanding niches?
The other reason Optane excels is latency. This is why single-threaded use cases, like system boot, love it.
IOPS do not tell the whole story here. Consider disk A, at 1M IOPS, against disk B, at 1k IOPS. Suppose the workload is light, at only 500 IOPS, which are "small" enough to service quickly. Which disk is higher performing?
You might say they're both capable of the task, so just get the cheaper one. This is wrong. Assume, for sake of a simple argument, that disk A can respond in 1us to these requests, and disk B in 1ms. That is, they'd be able to hit "max IOPS" on these requests, if only you have enough. Then disk A services the whole thing in 500us per second, or 0.05% used, and disk B in 500ms per second, or 50% used.
So disk A is in fact actually 1000x faster, if you're waiting on its result. Which, for single-threaded operations, you often are. If you're instead optimizing for throughput, you don't care.
Either point of view can be correct, at different times or for different systems. Ignorance that both points of view exist is how things like bufferbloat are everywhere now.
> The other reason Optane excels is latency.
It's not an "other reason". IO operations at queue depth 1 are a direct measurement of latency. Queue depth 1 is not about throughput at all.
> Suppose the workload is light, at only 500 IOPS, which are "small" enough to service quickly.
I will assume the workload is light in CPU too, since spending half the time waiting for the disk is apparently not an instant disqualification.
> So disk A is in fact actually 1000x faster, if you're waiting on its result. Which, for single-threaded operations, you often are. If you're instead optimizing for throughput, you don't care.
If you're waiting on a bunch of results and disk A gets them to you significantly faster, it sounds like your initial premise of "only 500 IOPS" was wrong or misleading.
If you have a response time you want to meet, then you should measure IOPS with a sliding window of that many milliseconds. If it's still 500 at most, then disk B will still be fine for meeting your target.
If it turns out that "500" actually comes in bursts of 50 operations, and you want to be done in 10 milliseconds, then you should label your workload as "5k IOPS". Put in a drive that does at least 10k and you'll see all calculations done in under a frame; basically perfect latency. A drive a million times faster would have no practical difference.
IOPS are actually meaningless assuming conventional filesystem APIs. In the context of those APIs, IOPS are just a different way of writing MB/s except you get to show off that your block sizes are smaller.
Latency is a much bigger factor with conventional filesystem APIs. If you had fully async filesystem APIs that read offset x1 on file f1, offset x1 on file2, offset x100 on file f100 all at the same time then you would see linear scaling and the difference between Optane and NAND would grow smaller. However, that would require learning a new and much harder paradigm (you now have to be aware of parallelism inside SSDs). Optane is a simple upgrade that requires no software changes.
Genuinely curious, are disk writes a big part of booting? I'd imagine it to be mostly large sequential reads. Especially since operating systems have a long history of booting from HDD and still need reasonable support for that, I wouldn't expect the boot process has a whole lot of disk thrashing. I also can't think of a reason why it would need to.
Preface: My experience is primarily on Windows (required for, among others, crappy enterprise CAD software). Linux is probably different.
Most developer workstations have had SSDs for many years. This applies to the Windows 10 developers, too. So they haven't paid any real attention to performance regressions on HDDs, since it still works. It's just slow. But it's a HDD so who cares?
That means there's now a lot of I/O going on before and after login, more than would have ever been tolerated in the "old days". Yes, initial boot is just streaming reads, that's easy. But once the OS gets going, it starts logging things... writing. Or finishing up the dregs of the last system update. And NAND SSDs do not handle that mix well at all. They do extremely well with all-reads and very well with all-writes, but a mix will bog them down (block granularity? I don't know why).
Optane doesn't do that. It doesn't care about reads versus writes, or small writes between larger reads. It just goes, and it responds fast no matter what the mix.
It's not really the sort of thing where you notice "wow, this is so fast". It's the sort of thing where you notice randomly sometime that "hey, I've never actually had to wait for this disk". It's harder to notice the absence of pain compared to the pain itself. With Optane, something else is always the bottleneck.
It's not a huge effect, but it was pretty easy to justify the smaller price premium for Optane a few years ago when it was introduced. I fully expected it would carve out a bigger niche for itself at the top of the performance market -- because it really is the top, ahead of anything NAND -- but that hasn't happened. More Intel failings, I guess.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fastest-windows-10-boot... I should have just googled it. So 4 seconds for optane and 5 for Samsung. I'm surprised, but it looks legit. Though I wonder now if pcie4 changes things since the article was published.
That's my point in the other post. Is that 1 second boot time gain really worth the money? Not arguing against it for heavy duty enterprise workloads. But as a consumer, at one point the extra performance is wasted on them.
Sure, but if you're a power user with deep pockets, you may still be interested. But you'll want to know whether you can something tangible out of it on your workstation, and it's not exclusively a multitenant cloud database optimizer (or worse, a regression for typical workstation workload performance).
So, the Windows boot speed comparison provides an indication that it'll give some benefit to personal workstations too. Whether it's worth it or not is another question entirely.
Not writes at boot, but the common bottleneck on desktop storage is usually low queue depth IO, which is where Optane excels.
It's not an abundantly high throughput device like NVMe, but for ZIL/SLOG and other caching where it's more about volume of tiny transactions, Optane is very useful.
Of course in enterprise you'd just buy a PCIe card with the characteristics your workloads require which makes Optane very "prosumer", so I understand why Intel would axe the line.
This depends a lot on the operating system and on how it is configured.
On my Gentoo Linux, there are absolutely no writes during booting.
On the other hand, for my job, I have installed Windows 10 Enterprise on several kinds of embedded computers.
Some of those computers used some ancient model of Transcend SATA SSDs, which had an extremely low writing speed, of only around 40 Mbyte/s, much like a memory card (and not like a good one).
After the default installation of Windows 10, the booting was unbelievably slow, it could take maybe a half hour or so. When Windows 10 decided that it must install updates, it was much worse. The computer became available after booting only after a few hours.
I had to waste a few days with the unhelpful Windows Knowledge Base and with some more helpful Internet forums, until I discovered how to shut down all the Windows services that wanted to write to the SSD during booting, so that eventually the booting time of Windows reached an acceptable value of less than a minute.
On the same hardware Linux booted almost instantly, because the SSD reading speed was decent, unlike its writing speed.
There are Linux distributions that I do not use, e.g. Ubuntu, and I would not be surprised if those also come with default configurations that attempt to write during booting, e.g. for updating file indexing databases, or other such crap.
For anyone curious, UserBenchmark is a pretty good resource to compare different drives - here's the 900P up against Samsung 980 Pro, both best-in-class.
https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-980-Pro-NVMe-P...
I don't think it's wise from a long term public good/civic good point of view for consumers to give any sort of apologetic consideration to the business reasons for consumer unfriendly moves.
The moment capitalism becomes an excuse for capitalism crony capitalism becomes inevitable.
The evils of market segmentation and to a broader degree "value-add" should not be legitimized.
Capitalism is neither good or evil, it is a neutral force that can be leveraged for both. I don't want to offer excuses, but rather find explanations. Imagine you are the CEO of Intel (or VP of that business unit) - what would you do in their shoes?
Arguably consumer Optane was a very expensive placebo and thus canceling it is consumer friendly.
Agreed. I have one of those fancy 32gb optane boost drives that supposedly does smart caching.
Can't really tell a difference in performance regardless of whether it is activated or not.
NVME also wasn't as widespread as it is now, 3 years ago, when Optane was launching.
An enterprise grade NVME SSD closed that gap significantly with Optane drives, compared to regular SATA III SSDs.
Also, SSD flash controllers are now mature enough to the point where you can just throw a ton of low-grade flash at it, and have very respectable performance.
From a large-scale purchasing and architectural roadmap point of view, this tells me they won’t enjoy the economies of scale that flash enjoys, and the enterprise drives will be dead in a few years.
Either that, or they’re transitioning to offer consumer grade NVDIMMs, but the hardware APIs for those are really difficult to take advantage of for general purpose compute.
> From a large-scale purchasing and architectural roadmap point of view, this tells me they won’t enjoy the economies of scale that flash enjoys, and the enterprise drives will be dead in a few years.
I think a lot of OEMs and users quickly figured out that a 128Tb m.2 SSD wasn't much more than a 32gb Optane module cost-wise, at which point you can have your whole boot drive and more on an SSD.
I'm not certain whether enterprise drives will die off as quickly, I suppose it depends on market trends. One marketed plus of 3D XPoint technology was far better write endurance and lack of need for garbage collection. If a data center has a lot of rolling data to process it might not be a bad fit.
So if I am a professional, I am no longer good enough for Intel to buy this product? Optane gives insane compilation speed boost when you store large codebases on it. Now only big corporations will be able to get competitive advantage over smaller businesses not being able to afford enterprise deal with Intel. I think something like that should be illegal.
Sounds like 3d-xpoint is not going to live up to its potential. Which is sad, because if it received the same R&D and manufacturing budget that NAND flash does, it could have really been something.
It's tough to break into an established market with a new technology. Battery tech also suffers from this problem. It's hard to challenge Li Ion now, even if you have something theoretically better. The manufacturing advantage is just too strong.
Sad but not surprised. Optane was simply too expensive for consumer market.
I was really excited by its 2nd Gen though [1], much closer to what Intel originally promised with Optane. And Read Write Speed that finally rivals other SSDs. I was hoping they would release a Consumer versions so we could do a benchmark against other PCI-E 4.0 SSD so we could finally settle the false assumption that Random Read is everything.
[1] https://www.servethehome.com/new-intel-optane-p5800x-100-dwp...
I'll miss it - we have a Virtualized Windows 2019 Server on it that reboots in 9 seconds. We set it to auto login and it's at the full in the desktop and ready to go.
Hopefully Micron will introduce an equivalent version.
Surprised Optane would help that. I would figure boot would be mostly large reads, minimal writes, which flash would do just as well or better, especially on PCIe 4.0.
Having it on a VM host bypasses a lot of bios delay.
Optane, at the time we bought it, was significantly faster than any consumer SSD.
With a Windows 10 install mounted on the Optane and installing it to a Optane hosted VM, the install takes four minutes if you have that file that answers the quetions Windows needs to install.
Typical intel move. They start something and then kill it shortly after if the new product did not have the massive impact they hoped for. I would not be surprised if they kill the optane enterprise products or simply dont develop a new version and some improvements in ssds will make optane not very interesting as it would not be much better but dramatically more expensive.
If something doesn’t have the business impact a company hopes, it seems perfectly reasonable to kill it. Focus matters. Messaging matters. If a sub-market is break-even or only slightly profitable, get out of it.
From a short term business point of view sure.
For a customer heavily invested in this new tech it's not great. Those will complain all over. It will hurt customer confidence in the long term. Meaning your new products have even less chance at mass adoption even if they're really good. Customers appreciate when you stand behind your products.
Consider companies like Google that are well known for shutting down services. And they're usually free, yet still people are now more hesitant to put their stuff in it.
Not permitting several weeks’ notice for a “last time buy” is crappy, though that’s fairly unusual and not a well understood action in the consumer segment as compared to enterprise, so I’m not sure that you or I could personally have gotten any in any meaningful way. They’re still available in-channel (NewEgg and Dell both have them at normal-seeming prices) right now for consumers who need them, which is effectively a “last time buy” in the consumer segment. I’d be surprised if Dell was not given a last-time buy notice.
I’m not nearly as convinced that “Intel once stopped selling Optane drives for consumers; you can’t trust them” is anywhere near as likely (nor valid) as “Intel has made major mis-steps in microcode resulting in serious degradation of performance after the sale for mitigations, seems to be struggling with their next process step change, and is facing major pressures now not just from AMD but now from ARM and Apple”.
In some sense the Optane decision is like the Google one. “Should I bet something important on this technology that isn’t making the company any money?” is a very fair question to ask.
seems to be the way tech at large exists & is done today. business as usual, with only massive colossal megaflare disruption bothering to register for anyone. so so so many wonderful potentials for humanity that were doing great things for some, but which hadn't seen rapid drastic shirt term adoption. terrible way to doom a species, imo. feels like there's few sympathetic voices here on HN, few who recognize this particular loss, & the meaning of long term & harder struggles. very sad seeing such mentalities saturate the world.
really hard to hear this. the 905's were light years ahead of ssd's & priced accessible to consumers, if you didn't need a ton of space. optane floating off into strictly-very-serious-business pricing tiers is a big loss.
I just need 32gb of optane for zfs zil for now...
and. i hope to be able to buy big sticks of "ram" cheap because they're actually optane with ram cache...like maybe 256gb optane + 32gb ddr5...one day....
I believe they are chopping some segments within Intel to strategically play the next coming months with the release of their dedicated DX2 GPU (400-600$)by outsourcing its fab with either TSMC or Samsung...and they'll kill that also after a year, smh team blue cant catch a break these days.
This seems fine, they're still going to produce NAND with an Optane cache.
That gets you the price and 80% of the performance.
Is the cache smart about prefetching related files to your current activity?
If not, it's so tiny that while it will give you amazing performance on disk and database benchmarks I'm not convinced it will be notably better than an SLC cache when doing anything else. And an SLC cache doesn't require an extra chip.
The drives with NAND and Optane are pretty bad products though, and Intel doesn't even attempt to sell them directly to consumers. They're basically the dumping grounds for leftover/low-grade QLC NAND and 3D XPoint chips.
Since NAND business was sell to SK Hynix this was expected move.
They sold off the flash but not the Optane, yet it's the 100% Optane drives they cancel and not the drives that are 5% Optane. I don't see how this is expected.
Software hasn't improved in 40 years, really... and now hardware is starting its downhill slide as well.
Good grief.
%s/hardware/Intel/g
Useless g flag
I remember frequent “System Error Type 11”s from 20 years ago, and (almost!) nothing even equivalent to that in the last decade.
Software has improved a lot, even if UI responsiveness hasn’t.
The very HP Convertible I'm typing on has an Intel Optane drive in it.. for me, this really is the fastest computer I'll ever have, and it really is all downhill from here when this thing dies.
I really meant it, even if I was too grief stricken to express it better.
For me, this marks the end of Moore's law.