intel Too fast for its own good: Intel kills consumer Optane

[BachChain]

Summary

Originally conceived as one of several next-generation solid state storage technologies, Intel's Optane memory promised higher performance, lower latency, and longer endurance than conventional NAND SSDs. While this has led to Optane being very successful in the professional and data-center markets, the consumer segment has had a somewhat more troubled history. Since its original release in early 2017, Optane has suffered from multiple problems that prevented it from reaching widespread adoption; from high costs and low densities to seemingly arbitrary platform restrictions and esoteric intended use cases. Four years later, Intel has decided enough is enough and is pulling the plug. In a move that seemingly came out of nowhere, Intel has announced that they are immediately discontinuing all consumer oriented SKUs of their Optane high speed SSDs. The affected models are:

• Optane Memory 900P and 905P - AIC - 280GB, 480GB, 960GB and 1.5TB
• Optane Memory 900P and 905P - U.2 - 280GB, 480GB, 960GB, 1.5TB
• Optane Memory 905P - M.2 - 380GB
• Optane Memory M10 - M.2  - 16GB, 32GB, 64GB
• Optane Memory 800P - M.2 - 58GB, 118GB

Intel apparently wants to get this over with as quickly as possible, as the discontinuation dates they set had already passed by the time they sent the announcement with the last shipments going out on February 26. Following this move, it appears the only consumer drives utilizing Optane technology will be Optane/NAND hybrids like the recently announced H20 O.E.M. drive.

 

Quotes

Quote

"Intel will not provide a new large capacity Optane Memory SSD as a transition product for the client market segment. Intel will focus on the new Optane Memory H20 with Solid State Storage for the client market segment."

Quote

Intel's discontinuation period is incredibly brief, too, with all discontinued drives no longer offered as of the publication date of the notices, or a few days prior as we see with the 800P series:

	Discontinuation Posted	Last Order Date	Last Shipment Date
Intel Optane Memory 900 and 905P Series	January 15, 2021	January 15, 2021	February 26, 2021
Intel Optane Memory 800P Series	January 14, 2021	January 11, 2021	February 26, 2021
Intel Optane Memory M10 Series	January 13, 2021	January 13, 2021	February 26, 2021

Quote

As we often see, 'cheap and good enough' tends to win in the market, and the pricing and capacity advantages of garden-variety TLC SSDs, paired with the good-enough performance for most consumers, relegated Intel's Optane drives to a niche category for either the most hardcore enthusiasts or the workstation market.

My thoughts

 I've never used an Optane drive, but I had been looking forward to when these next-gen ultra low latency drives became widespread. Undoubtedly, this will cause a significant delay to that transition.

 

Sources

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

[Quackers101]

or if they are going to use another tech that might be cheaper to produce?

But yeah, wanted to see what optane tech would come, I guess it's a big no.

[jaslion]

Really the only point for optane was to be a oh no I'm gonna run out of ram rendering this stuff buffer or a very very fast cache drive. Tasks that almost no consumer would ever run in to. That and as the article said a garden variety ssd is plenty for basically everyone.

[MII-333GP]

Whodathunkit, things get killed off when nobody buys them (outside of a handful of tiny capacity ones through OEMs) due to other products being much more competitive. Wack.

[ProjectBox153]

The only Optane drive I own is currently in use as a very fast but very low capacity (16GB) USB flash drive. I thought it was interesting, though. 

[Spotty]

13 minutes ago, Quackers101 said:

or if they are going to use another tech that might be cheaper to produce?

From the article:

Quote

The discontinuation notices for the M10 and 800P series also point Intel's customers to the Optane Memory H20 drives. The H20 drives come with Optane memory paired with QLC flash on the same device. These caching drives aren't nearly as fast as Optane-only drives (they aren't even in the same league) and are designed primarily for laptops and the OEM market. 

So maybe more qlc nand flash drives with optane caching in the future?

Edited January 17, 2021 by Spotty

[Quackers101]

3 minutes ago, Spotty said:

So maybe more qlc drives with optane caching in the future?

Will that be that much better? from some of the intel stuff I have seen, even more SSD like options have been a bit more expensive and if this would make much of a difference? Although would be cool to see how it performs to other stuff. Kinda wish to see something more, like samsung or someone else did something recently didn't they (not the intel stacking stuff or whatever it was)

[WhitetailAni]

I own 2 16GB Optane modules. 
Paid $7 for one of them, nothing for another.
Once I can, I'll use StoreMI for one of them for my big storage drive and probably leave the other as standalone.

Unless you can RAID them and then use that as a cache?

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Could this be a new CEO move?

[Guest]

Ughhhhhhhhh. H10s are such trash. I have 5 of them sitting in a box along with 20 16GBs and a dozen 32GBs.

Do have some 900ps in the office doing good work tho.

[Radium_Angel]

33 minutes ago, MII-333GP said:

 things get killed off when nobody buys them

Or they have stupid system requirements, like demanding 8th gen Intel CPUs....

[Radium_Angel]

2 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Could this be a new CEO move?

That sort of depends, if the Optane systems were designed and implemented under the prior CEO, then yeah, it could be a pissing match wherein the new CEO tries to kill off everything the prior CEO did, to establish dominance...

 

[ProjectBox153]

17 minutes ago, Den-Fi said:

I have 5 of them sitting in a box along with 20 16GBs and a dozen 32GBs.

I offer free recycling of computers and computer components. /s

[Helpful Tech Witch]

4 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

That sort of depends, if the Optane systems were designed and implemented under the prior CEO, then yeah, it could be a pissing match wherein the new CEO tries to kill off everything the prior CEO did, to establish dominance...

 

I don't thin they were. But could it be a new CEO taking the company in a new direction that's more CPU and GPU focused.

[Random_Person1234]

12 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Could this be a new CEO move?

The new CEO doesn't take over until Feb. 15.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

3 minutes ago, Random_Person1234 said:

The new CEO doesn't take over until Feb. 15.

Til. It's weird that there haven't been leeks of this though.

[Radium_Angel]

9 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

GPU focused.

I'd like to see a new GPU player in the market, Matrox notwithstanding (do they even make video cards anymore?), especially one oriented towards ML and/or gamers.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Just now, Radium_Angel said:

I'd like to see a new GPU player in the market, Matrox notwithstanding (do they even make video cards anymore?), especially one oriented towards ML and/or gamers.

Well there is the like quarterly internet dgpu leaks. But idk. I feel like we've heard the same thing for a bit about Intel gpus

[Dutch_Master]

We'll probably never know, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a supply line issue. Options are: EOM/SI got a great deal on the remaining stock, some fab somewhere got a malfunction, 3rd party parts no longer available (unlikely, suppliers are under contract to deliver and get hefty fines if they don't) or any other reason the supply chain broke.

 

Or it's as simple as the Optane line not contributing to projected revenue as expected.

 

Your guess is as good as mine!

[leadeater]

Well this is incredibly lame.

[hihihi8]

welp, I guess to the average consumer, this stuff is now truly unoptanable.

[Master Disaster]

Maybe a side affect of the rumours that Intel are outsourcing much of their CPU & non CPU fabbing to TSMC? Perhaps they couldn't secure enough capacity to keep supplies running for both enterprise & consumer level SKUs?

[porina]

15 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Or they have stupid system requirements, like demanding 8th gen Intel CPUs....

That only applies to Optane Memory when used as cache devices. The SSDs were as compatible in any system as any other SSD.

 

13 hours ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

The original plan always was to provide another memory tier with lower latency and higher throughout between memory and slower storage. And they didn't manage to be 1000x faster than SSDs.

I think there were multiple factors getting in the way of that. One, NVMe interface is too slow and not designed for low latency. 2nd, due to the cost, the capacity had to be kept low, and that meant it couldn't scale upwards. In a similar way we see 2TB flash SSDs performing better than the same model in 512GB form.

 

50 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Maybe a side affect of the rumours that Intel are outsourcing much of their CPU & non CPU fabbing to TSMC? Perhaps they couldn't secure enough capacity to keep supplies running for both enterprise & consumer level SKUs?

From memory (so this might not be 100% accurate) Xpoint was a joint development with Micron, and they parted way some years ago. I believe at the time Micron retained the manufacturing facilities although Intel would still have a share of the output for some time. It may be that part of the arrangement is coming to a close, so they have to focus more on how much and where it goes, such as more towards the far better profit enterprise market. Even though Intel had rights to it I don't recalling they ever started manufacturing it themselves. 

[Vorg]

They come out with something better the the dead end nand flash, try to recover their dev cost in a small limited production making it cost too much for most anyone to buy and then drop it, Not enough sales?  Wonder why. If they had ramped up production to get cost down right away and spread the dev cost over a longer time, it would not be selling now because it would be out of stock like everything else from high demand. Maybe the next group will do better with Ultraram:

 

https://contest.techbriefs.com/2020/entries/electronics-sensors-iot/10357

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ultraram-non-volatile-ram-dram-flash-storage

 

Nah, big companies can't think that way. They all want big bucks right away.

[spartaman64]

this is after they decided to sell off their nand division also