To long to release These products are taking to long to release. I was expecting this tech to be out for consumer by middle of this year at latest. Are there any other competitors to Optane that don't rely on Micron? Or is this the problem to begin with, no competition.

These products are taking to long to release. I was expecting this tech to be out for consumer by middle of this year at latest. Are there any other competitors to Optane that don't rely on Micron? Or is this the problem to begin with, no competition.

When 3D Xpoint was announced it was basically sold as being a giant breakthrough in memory technology. Almost every single tech journalist was surprised that such a breakthrough product was being brought to market so quickly. From Anandtech:

3D XPoint has a lot to chew on. There hasn't been an announcement this big in the memory industry since the invention of NAND in 1989 and while DRAM and NAND have improved and scaled a lot over the decades, 3D XPoint is really a new class of memory. It's fast, durable, scalable and non-volatile, whereas DRAM and NAND each only meet two of these criteria. It fills the niche between DRAM and NAND by taking the best characteristics of both technologies and creating a memory unlike anything we have seen before.

The significance of the announcement isn't just the new memory technology, but that it's actually in production with volume shipments scheduled for next year. Intel and Micron have succeeded in bringing a concept from a lab to an actual fab, which is by far the most difficult part in any new semiconductor technology. Something that works well in a lab may not be mass producible at all, but Intel and Micron made the necessary investments to develop new material compounds and surrounding technologies to turn 3D XPoint into a real product. It will be interesting to see how the other DRAM and NAND vendors respond because the memory industry is one where you don't want your rivals to have something you don't for an extended period of time.

This was in July 2015. So I'm not sure why you think it's taken long for it to release. Seems really quick to me, especially considering it's a breakthrough technology that operates a lot differently then existing memory technologies.

Intel were never going to rush this out. The real game-changing use-case for XPoint is utilising as non-volatile RAM. But that requires support from the entire platform. Using XPoint as a premium "SSD" is significant, but you already need some pretty specific workloads to see any meaningful benefit from something like a 950Pro in a high end desktop. There's just no significant market for Intel in the desktop/consumer space right now for an ever higher tiered SSD. That means targeting servers with with seriously intensive IO requirements. It's a safe bet that before releasing a brand new product based on brand new tech as a premium storage device for their most demanding and deep-pocketed customers, Intel are going to want to take their time with some serious validation processes. In any case, I'll be much more interested to see what sort of benefits we might get from a large pool of non-volatile RAM on Kaby Lake. The potential benefits are massive, but I wonder how long they take actually become a reality.

These products are taking to long to release. I was expecting this tech to be out for consumer by middle of this year at latest.

https://media2.giphy.com/media/glmRyiSI3v5E4/200.gif I dun even. Anyway, what I will say is that it cannot come out fast enough. Can't wait to get my hands on these new ssds.