Intel to Discontinue Optane Products for the Consumer Market

The Optane products have been both impressive and disappointing ever since the beginning. Impressive for the sheer performance it offers, and disappointing due to the high price levels. In fact, most Optane products ended up as cache only solution due to that price.

With the current state of the NAND industry reaching 7 GB/sec already on affordable M.2 NVMe units, Intel now seems to be pulling the plug on everything Optane related in the consumer market. Tom's hardware reported the discontinuation and also received updated feedback on the topic. Intel discontinued the Optane Memory M10, 800P, 900P, and 905P SSDs, representing the entirety of its Optane-only family for desktop PCs. Intel's 900P and 905P discontinuation notice states:

"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."

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. 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:

The last orders will ship on February 26, 2021, for all models. To the question of if that means Intel has effectively ended its Optane-only product lines for consumers?'

"Your statement is technically correct, but consumers do benefit from Optane based-solutions like the Intel Optane Memory H20, since it is for mobile consumer." - Intel representative.