Intel to Discontinue Optane Products for the Consumer Market
Click here to post a comment for Intel to Discontinue Optane Products for the Consumer Market on our message forum
Clawedge
Doesnt Micron have its own version of optane? i believe they developed it together anyway
https://www.micron.com/products/advanced-solutions/3d-xpoint-technology
Hilbert Hagedoorn
Administrator
Yes. Optane was developed by Intel and Micron together. Micron produced the ICsRoughly a year or so ago Intel already announced they would separate the development, which is now in hands of Micron, 3DXpoint.
Fox2232
Hmm, at first, very few wanted it. Intel got rid of excess stock through forcing it into laptops and bundling it with other products.
As they got rid of undesirable stock while product did not get traction, they end support. Not surprised.
Andy Watson
My daughters cheap HP PC had this in with a 1 TB HDD drive, it was really fast until it ran out of capacity, but for what she needed it was fine.
Then the hard drive died in under 6 months, I used another HDD but even following all the convoluted instructions it would not work. So I just bought an SDD drive put it in and has worked to this day, and never runs out of steam. SDDs so cheap why bother with Optane with all its downsides, hence why they are not popular.
cucaulay malkin
still want that 118gb for os
XenthorX
Remember Star Citizen officially promoting those drives a couple years ago. Well.. 😱
Edit: found it + Damn those drives are expensive !
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/promotions/intel-optane
Ssateneth
Don't know why they want to discontinue it. Optane is arguably a superior product. It's just the most recent optane product was made before PCI-E 4.0 devices were becoming widely available. The latency figures absolutely trounces NAND solution, has superior IOPS, and practically no degradation of performance after long periods of writing. It's a little weak on sequential read/write but I chalk that up to PCI-E 3.0. It's a shame... I hope Micron makes a consumer-level PCI-E 4.0 solution soon. I have the Optane 905P 1.5TB and would like to see an evolution of that soon.
Kaarme
A NAND SSD you can afford is far better than an Optane SSD you can't afford.
geogan
I have no idea what Optane is and nobody told me - their marketing/sales departments obviously failed badly.
If they did their job right someone like me (college degree in computer science + PC tech enthusiast + professional developer) should have no way of not noticing or finding out about some new technology - should have been shoved in my face through all the targeted ad technology in world right now!
Astyanax
You weren't their market.
nosirrahx
With its price, form factor and capacity Optane never really stood a chance. Out of the entire lineup probably the 118GB 800P was the closest thing they had to a useful drive and it was too expensive.
The 905P M.2 drive was awesome but required a 22110 compatible M.2 port. This excludes all laptop as the only ones with 22110 length ports were SATA only.
The 58GB 800P was the only drive worth using as Optane cache not only was it too expensive, Intel only officially supported the 16 and 32GB drives for this, even though ALL Optane drives work as Optane cache.
The 905P really is an amazing OS drive but the only ones with decent capacity were PCIe cards or U.2 and those were also crazy expensive.
I've got Optane drives in a bunch of systems and the performance is pretty amazing but I really never felt comfortable recommending them since a better graphics card is the best use of $ for almost anyone with a system that already has a SSD. In a work station Optane really is the way to go, too bad Intel didn't even really seem to go after this angle.
nosirrahx
Micron had a paper launch for the X100, I have never seen one advertised anywhere or any actual benchmarks.
What is real is the P5800X from Intel and it will be pretty amazing. These are PCIe 4.0 and the 4KQ1T1 is even faster than the 905P. I wish they advertised that a bit more since for most people crazy sequential speed really does not matter much. Every decent NVMe SSD has great sequential but even the best of the best only reach about 80MB/S for 4KQ1T1. The 905P could reach ~300MB/S 4KQ1T1 and even in RAID would get over 200MB/S.
The P5800X ordering codes are:
SSDPF21Q400GB01
SSDPF21Q800GB01
SSDPF21Q016TB01
At this point all of them are U.2, I suspect that Intel is going to simplify this generation of drives and we may not see anything other than U.2.
RavenMaster
Optane was DOA thanks to M.2 NVMe SSD's
Austin358
Was hoping for an Optane PCIe 4.0 refresh myself...but even today the performance for Optane 905P 960GB, "the fastest consumer SSD ever made," is lagging behind at least one M.2 SSD based on Anvil total score.
If Micron comes out with an M.2 PCIe 4.0 3D XPoint offering, I'll of course take a look. But we should allow for the possibility that Intel's new CEO is moving the goal posts to later this year...and PCIe 5.0.
chinobino
When the M15 was announced as being cancelled back in September 2019 it was already dead.
The Optane M10 only used 2 x PCI-e 3.0 lanes, which the M15 was supposed to improve on with 4 x PCI-e 3.0 lanes but "as sales of PCs with HDDs dropped faster than expected" Intel realised no-one really wanted HDD's with an overpriced SSD cache.
Austin358
Austin358
@nosirrahhx: But it looks like you are referring to Optane 905P's non-sequential *write* for 4KQ1T1 ("~300MB?s")...? That's actually being matched by at least one PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD on the market today. And while Optane 905P's *read* speeds...arguably the key metric for most PC/workstation performances...are better, the truthful answer is "not by much, and M.2 SSDs are closing in fast." You can buy a fistful of future M.2 SSDs for the $1,300-$2,000 that the 905P costs today. As always, we'll eventually see another leapfrogging technology for non-vol memory. But today it does not appear that it will be Optane.
https://i.imgur.com/w6aI9B5.jpg
nosirrahx
We will have to wait for P5800X reviews to see what 2nd gen Optane could have offered to consumers but the stats are far better than the 1st gen, on paper at least. The 4KQ1T1 write performance "looks" good for NAND but that is the DRAM cache talking. In sustained workstation mixed read/write NAND gets absolutely flattened by Optane.
My current workstation uses 4 905P drives in VROC RAID 0 and this is what I am getting for performance. You can certainly match the sequential speed with NAND drives in RAID 0 but when it comes to 4KQ1T1, NAND in RAID 0 does not even come close:
https://i.imgur.com/MCa857u.jpg
nosirrahx
For Optane cache, I completely agree. If you have a M.2 NVMe port and a HDD, just install a M.2 SSD and reinstall windows, use the HDD as backup. In general Optane was just too complicated for the average Jane/Joe.
Optane SSDs could have been great but they came to market with them 1 or 2 generations too early. 1st gen Optane on M.2 2280 form factor topped out at 118GB and were way too expensive.
Gen 3 Optane could very well fit 512 GB on the M.2 2280 form factor and if the price it right, this would be one hell of an enthusiast class boot/apps drives. This is several years away potentially so who knows, maybe Intel will make some breakthroughs that will allow Optane to achieve a competitive capacity and price.
brogadget
Just for comparison reason, my VROC RAID0 (Standard key) with 2x Lenovo OEM drives Intel 7600p 512GB SSDPEKKF512G8L (each drive was approx $75.- two years ago). IMO for a reasonable good and cheap VROC solution, performance is not bad:
The 905p M.2 drive alone is currently $500.- in my country (crazy expensive).
Someone has a VROC bench with DC P4801X 100GB drives (SSDPEL1K100GA01)?
