Somewhere I still have some actual battery-backed DIMMs (DRAM plus FPGA interposer plus awkward little supercapacitor bundle) in a drawer. They were not made by Intel, but Intel was clearly using them as a stepping stone toward the broader NVDIMM ecosystem. They worked on exactly one SuperMicro board, kind of, and not at all if you booted using UEFI. Rebooting without doing the magic handshake over SMBUS [0] first took something like 15 minutes, which was not good for those nines of availability.
[0] You can find my SMBUS host driver for exactly this purpose on the LKML archives. It was never merged, in part, because no one could ever get all the teams involved in the Xeon memory controller to reach any sort of agreement as to who owned the bus or how the OS was supposed to communicate without, say, defeating platform thermal management or causing the refresh interval to get out of sync with the DIMM temperature, thus causing corruption.
I’m suspicious that everything involved in Optane development was like this.
There was certainly a time when it seemed they were shopping for engineers opinions of what to do with it, but I think they quickly determined it would be a much smaller market anyway from ssds and didn’t end up pushing on it too hard. I could be wrong though, it’s a big company and my corner was manufacturing and not product development.
There were/are often projects that come down from management that nobody thinks are worth pursuing. When i say nobody, it might not just be engineers but even say 1 or 2 people in management who just do a shit roll out. There are a lot of layers of Intel and if even one layer in the Intel Sandwich drag their feet it can kill an entire project. I saw it happen a few times in my time there. That one specific node that intel dropped the ball on kind of came back to 2-3 people in one specific department, as an example.
Optane was a minute before I got there, but having been excited about it at the time and somewhat following it, that's the vibe I get from Optane. It had a lot of potential but someone screwed it up and it killed the momentum.
Of course it works exceptionally well when the instinct turns out to be right. But can end companies if it isn’t.
For a lot of bulk storage, yes, you don't have frequently changing data. But for databases or caches, that are under heavy load, optane was not only far faster, but if looking at life-cycle costs, way way less.
The niche that could actually make use of Optane's endurance was small and shrinking, and Intel had no roadmap to significantly improve Optane's $/GB which was unquestionably the technology's biggest weakness.
I have to wonder if it isn't usable for some kind of specialized AI workflow that would benefit from extremely low latency reads but which is isn't written often, at this point. Perhaps integrated in a GPU board.
But Optane still offered 100 DWPD (drive writes per day), up to 3.2TB. Thats still just so many more DWPD than flash ssd. A Kioxia CM8V for example will do 12TB at 3 DWPD. The net TBW is still 10x apart.
You can get back to high endurance with SLC drives like the Solidigm p7-p5810, but you're back down to 1.6TB and 50 DWPD, so, 1/4 the Intel P5800X endurance, and worse latencies. I highly suspect the drive model here is a homage, and in spite of being much newer and very expensive, the original is still so much better in so many ways. https://www.solidigm.com/content/solidigm/us/en/products/dat...
You also end up paying for what I assume is a circa six figure drive, if you are substituting DWPD with more capacity than you need. There's something elegant about being able to keep using your cells, versus overbuying on cells with the intent to be able to rip through them relatively quickly.