Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That is just not true, in any shape or form.

It wasn't mismanaged at all. Neither Intel or Micron could make it cost competitive. Optane had its shining moment when DRAM and NAND ( both are commodities like ) skyrocketed 3x the price, at one point making Samsung the most profitable company even surpassing Apple. There were roadmaps for power, reliability, performance and density improvement, literally everything except cost. Micron wasn't even the cheer leader, they were only happy to play along with Intel because Intel made the commitment to buy enough capacity for Micron to sustain the business.

And Optane could barely compete when DRAM and NAND price were at its peak, making zero profits on most of its revenue. Imagine when DRAM and NAND are back to normal.

The future of memory is either extremely low power on Mobile SoC or Ultra High Bandwidth in the server with 128 Cores. Both of these doesn't fit into Optane Roadmap.

The market is so small that despite Intel was giving away its optane product and selling it at zero margin they still couldn't fill the minimum orders commitment to Micron and had to paid its penalty.

[Article author here]

> Neither Intel or Micron could make it cost competitive.

Cost-competitive with what?

I think there are two misconceptions here.

1. It is a kind of memory, not disk. But it is non-volatile large-scale RAM. There isn't any other terabyte-scale non-volatile memory for it to compete against. So how can it fail to compete on cost when there was nothing for it to compete with?

2. As memory it was extremely competitive with conventional volatile memory, being much larger. ITRO n times (for integer values of n whatever that value may be) more Gb/$ is being competitive, IMHO.

Against flash storage: sure, more expensive, but orders of magnitude faster and orders of magnitude more write cycles -- that is highly competitive, isn't it?

I am very late to this reply.

At its peak, Optane Memory had double ( or nearly triple ) the memory capacity for the same price, at practically zero profit margin. Once DRAM prices falls, this advantage is gone. Remember this was compared to ECC high capacity DRAM module, the highest margin in the whole DRAM market.

It was ( and still is ) a wonderfully technology, but Optane Memory didn't serve a large enough market where non-volatile memory had obvious advantage. As memory it offers much lower bandwidth and response time than DDR4, which means substantial amount of Server workload does not fit Optane Memory's performance characteristics.

And again neither Intel or Micron is making any profits out of it. With no clear roadmap of cost reduction. Compared to conventional DRAM with DDR5 and NAND with Z-NAND.

The common misconception is that high write cycles, random read write, non-volatile memory had its place in the market for a price. Turns out this is a classic market mis-fit.

Um. I have to ask: did you read the article? All of it?

Because what you're offering as a comment is sort of a backwards version of the argument I'm making in the article.

My argument is that it flopped because of the monoculture of C21 OS design that means we lack OSes that can take full advantage of persistent-memory computers.

Yours seems to be that the kit wasn't competitive. I think that's a conflation of multiple category errors.

[1] It is not in the same product category as either DRAM or Flash.

It's not RAM: RAM is volatile, Optane is nonvolatile. But it can be used as primary storage, that is, appearing in the CPU memory map. It is not secondary storage, that is, storage requiring any kind of block-based controller handling.

It's not Flash: Flash is not word-writable and thus cannot be primary storage.

Because of decades of technical debt in C21 IT people do not know this vital primary/secondary distinction well. As a result they can only think in terms of two different types. Optane is not even neither type: it's both. It blurs the distinction. That's why it was important tech.

[2] Thus it is a fallacy to compare the price, or performance, or price:performance of a new tech that eliminates the primary/secondary split with either primary or secondary storage.

It is traditional in IT to make comparisons with automobiles.

It's like criticising cars because they are not good bicycles and they are not good aeroplanes.

These are different vehicles with different characteristics for different types of transport. To say that cars are bad bikes, or bad aeroplanes, means that you have failed to understand that cars are not either.

Cars are better for some things than bicycles. They are better for totally different things than aeroplanes.

You are trying to judge cars by the criteria of bicycles and aeroplanes, because you've never seen a car before and you're not used to thinking about cars. You're used to 2 categories and this is not either. It's not in the middle. It's a different category.

That is what the article was about.

Optane was still cheaper than DRAM modules of same capacity. And were twice larger for same price.

Really, I dream of Optane as a "super-fast swap drive" that "extends" RAM (that is what some manufacturers do with NVMe this days). Then it will be ease to have notebook with 256G "RAM" with actual 16G of DRAM and 256G Optane swap. Most users will not notice any difference compared to actual 256G DRAM since Optane is fast enough to make application switch fast. At least my Google Chrome and Intellij Idea could live in peace in such setup, each eating many gigabytes "RAM" since I don't code and watch sites at the same microsecond.

16GB optanes with an ordinary SSD interface are pretty widespread in China and DIYers do use them for swap/pagefile. The problem is that they take up a whole M.2 or NVMe slot with the corresponding number of PCIe lanes…

These drives generally come from budget laptops where the optane is originally used as the system disk. Not a good idea anyways and computer shops usually swap them out. You pay about 28 CNY for 16 GB, which is 2x the average SSD price-per-gig.

DRAM interfaced Optane wouldn't consume NVMe lanes. It should be soldered same way as usual DRAM is soldered in most non-professional (but home or bussiness) notebooks this days.

For example: MacBook M1/M2 has fixed limiter RAM. But with Optane as swap it could be four-eight times larger without user notice on difference.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com