5 ms·

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

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.
daxfohl 6y 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.
- exmadscientist 6y 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.
  - cm2187 6y ago
    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?
    - jiggawatts 6y ago
      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.
      - Dylan16807 6y ago
        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?
        6y ago
MrStonedOne 6y 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_silin 6y 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 6y ago
  Arguably consumer Optane was a very expensive placebo and thus canceling it is consumer friendly.
  - tryptophan 6y ago
    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.
antisthenes 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.

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.

daxfohl 6y 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.

exmadscientist 6y 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.
- cm2187 6y ago
  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?
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    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.
    - Dylan16807 6y ago
      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?
      - 6y ago

MrStonedOne 6y 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_silin 6y 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 6y ago
Arguably consumer Optane was a very expensive placebo and thus canceling it is consumer friendly.
- tryptophan 6y ago
  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.

antisthenes 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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.