6 ms·

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

92 points by ItsTotallyOn 6y ago

mikewarot 6y ago
Software hasn't improved in 40 years, really... and now hardware is starting its downhill slide as well. Good grief.
- pinewurst 6y ago
  %s/hardware/Intel/g
  - boogies 6y ago
    Useless g flag
- ben_w 6y 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.
- mikewarot 6y 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 6y 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.
- sokoloff 6y 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 6y 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.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      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.
- rektide 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
Since NAND business was sell to SK Hynix this was expected move.
- Dylan16807 6y 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_silin 6y 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 6y 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).
  - ksec 6y 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.
  - tomnipotent 6y ago
    PC gaming market is about the size of the console market.
    - joveian 6y ago
      But people who would buy special equipment that isn't price competitive with non-"gaming" alternatives is only a small portion of that.
  - incrudible 6y 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.
benjohnson 6y 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.
- daxfohl 6y 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.
  - benjohnson 6y 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.
ksec 6y 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-dwpd-ssd-dominates-pcie-gen4/ https://www.servethehome.com/new-intel-optane-p5800x-100-dwp...
pstrateman 6y 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.
- Dylan16807 6y 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 6y 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.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
alisausaaaaa 6y ago
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rektide 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

92 points by ItsTotallyOn 6y ago

mikewarot 6y ago

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

pinewurst 6y ago
%s/hardware/Intel/g
- boogies 6y ago
  Useless g flag
ben_w 6y 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.
mikewarot 6y 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 6y 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.

sokoloff 6y 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 6y 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.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    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.
rektide 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago

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

Dylan16807 6y 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_silin 6y 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 6y 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).
- ksec 6y 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.
- tomnipotent 6y ago
  PC gaming market is about the size of the console market.
  - joveian 6y ago
    But people who would buy special equipment that isn't price competitive with non-"gaming" alternatives is only a small portion of that.
- incrudible 6y 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.

benjohnson 6y 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.

daxfohl 6y 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.
- benjohnson 6y 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.

ksec 6y 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-dwpd-ssd-dominates-pcie-gen4/ https://www.servethehome.com/new-intel-optane-p5800x-100-dwp...

pstrateman 6y 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.

Dylan16807 6y 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 6y 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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

alisausaaaaa 6y ago

Wanna have hot-lovin' conversations? You’re on the right way! - https://adultlove.life https://adultlove.life

rektide 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.