Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-kills-off-all-optane-only-ssds-for-consumers-no-replacements-planned

by ItsTotallyOn • 6 years ago

92 53 6 years ago

tomshardware.com

mikewarot2• 6 years ago

Software hasn't improved in 40 years, really... and now hardware is starting its downhill slide as well.

Good grief.

pinewurst• 6 years ago

%s/hardware/Intel/g

boogies• 6 years ago

Useless g flag

ben_w• 6 years ago

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.

mikewarot2• 6 years ago

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.

tpetry• 6 years ago

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.

sokoloff2• 6 years ago

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.

GekkePrutser• 6 years ago

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.

rektide2• 6 years ago

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.

eloff• 6 years ago

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.

mobilio• 6 years ago

Since NAND business was sell to SK Hynix this was expected move.

Dylan168074• 6 years ago

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.

d_silin2• 6 years ago

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.

singhrac• 6 years ago

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).

ksec2• 6 years ago

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.

tomnipotent2• 6 years ago

PC gaming market is about the size of the console market.

incrudible• 6 years ago

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.

daxfohl5• 6 years ago

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.

exmadscientist3• 6 years ago

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.

MrStonedOne• 6 years ago

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.

d_silin2• 6 years ago

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?

wmf• 6 years ago

Arguably consumer Optane was a very expensive placebo and thus canceling it is consumer friendly.

antisthenes• 6 years ago

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.

hedora• 6 years ago

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.

to11mtm• 6 years ago

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.

varispeed• 6 years ago

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.

benjohnson2• 6 years ago

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.

daxfohl5• 6 years ago

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.

benjohnson2• 6 years ago

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.

ksec2• 6 years ago

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...

pstrateman• 6 years ago

This seems fine, they're still going to produce NAND with an Optane cache.

That gets you the price and 80% of the performance.

Dylan168074• 6 years ago

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.

wtallis• 6 years ago

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.

rektide2• 6 years ago

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.

lazylizard• 6 years ago

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....

K33P4D• 6 years ago

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.

Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

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