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Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

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Re: Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

#31

Post by rektide »

tpetry wrote: post #3

Typical intel move. They start something and then kill it shortly after if the new product did not have the massive impact they hoped for. I would not be surprised if they kill the optane enterprise products or simply dont develop a new version and some improvements in ssds will make optane not very interesting as it would not be much better but dramatically more expensive.

seems to be the way tech at large exists & is done today. business as usual, with only massive colossal megaflare disruption bothering to register for anyone. so so so many wonderful potentials for humanity that were doing great things for some, but which hadn't seen rapid drastic shirt term adoption. terrible way to doom a species, imo. feels like there's few sympathetic voices here on HN, few who recognize this particular loss, & the meaning of long term & harder struggles. very sad seeing such mentalities saturate the world.

Re: Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

#32

Post by daxfohl »

exmadscientist wrote: post #24
daxfohl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It made more sense a few years ago when they were only 2-3 times more expensive than flash. IDK if they could have predicted flash prices plummeting like they have, but for sure there's no worthwhile consumer reason to buy one now. BTW, I don't think they ever made much difference in gaming. My understanding is that they were optimized for database like workloads, where you get lots of small disparate writes.

They also make glorious boot/OS drives. Those typically see a heavy mix of reads and writes, which is where Optane's dominance over NAND is strongest. The 900P/905P was pretty much the absolute best C: drive money could buy.

Genuinely curious, are disk writes a big part of booting? I'd imagine it to be mostly large sequential reads. Especially since operating systems have a long history of booting from HDD and still need reasonable support for that, I wouldn't expect the boot process has a whole lot of disk thrashing. I also can't think of a reason why it would need to.

Re: Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

#33

Post by tomnipotent »

singhrac wrote: post #13
d_silin wrote: post #7

I'd like to express my thoughts on this, from business exec point of view. Consumer-grade Optane SSDs are not competetive with flash memory, simple as that. On performance and write endurance, flash-based SSD are "good enough", while also much better on cost-per-GB vs Optane. This reduces available market for Optane to gaming enthusiasts and similar customers - a very small slice of the total PC market. Now, for ente…

Are gaming enthusiasts a small market (in dollar terms)? I think the move is probably somewhat reasonable in terms of cutting costs, but I wonder why they didn't just license the technology to someone with experience selling to gamers (e.g. Corsair).

PC gaming market is about the size of the console market.

Re: Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

#35

Post by tomnipotent »

exmadscientist wrote: post #24
daxfohl wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It made more sense a few years ago when they were only 2-3 times more expensive than flash. IDK if they could have predicted flash prices plummeting like they have, but for sure there's no worthwhile consumer reason to buy one now. BTW, I don't think they ever made much difference in gaming. My understanding is that they were optimized for database like workloads, where you get lots of small disparate writes.

They also make glorious boot/OS drives. Those typically see a heavy mix of reads and writes, which is where Optane's dominance over NAND is strongest. The 900P/905P was pretty much the absolute best C: drive money could buy.

For anyone curious, UserBenchmark is a pretty good resource to compare different drives - here's the 900P up against Samsung 980 Pro, both best-in-class.

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-980-Pro-NVMe-P...

Re: Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

#36

Post by jiggawatts »

cm2187 wrote: post #25
exmadscientist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also make glorious boot/OS drives. Those typically see a heavy mix of reads and writes, which is where Optane's dominance over NAND is strongest. The 900P/905P was pretty much the absolute best C: drive money could buy.

But does that make a noticeable difference? I think a consumer SSD like the samsung 970 EVO PLUS has over 500k IOPS. Would you shave more than milliseconds from the boot time by going higher?

IOPS is measuring throughput for parallel operations.

Optane SSDs have extremely low latency, which is critical for sequential operations.

Most operating systems have long phases of largely single-threaded synchronous I/O, or nearly so. They certainly can't maintain queue depth required to even approach 500K IOPS.

Re: Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

#37

Post by Dylan16807 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #36
cm2187 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But does that make a noticeable difference? I think a consumer SSD like the samsung 970 EVO PLUS has over 500k IOPS. Would you shave more than milliseconds from the boot time by going higher?

IOPS is measuring throughput for parallel operations. Optane SSDs have extremely low latency , which is critical for sequential operations. Most operating systems have long phases of largely single-threaded synchronous I/O, or nearly so. They certainly can't maintain queue depth required to even approach 500K IOPS.

At queue depth 1 the 980 pro delivers 20k reads per second / 45k writes per second. That still sounds like a huge amount. Optane is faster, but is it enough to matter outside some extremely demanding niches?

Re: Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

#38

Post by exmadscientist »

daxfohl wrote: post #32
exmadscientist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also make glorious boot/OS drives. Those typically see a heavy mix of reads and writes, which is where Optane's dominance over NAND is strongest. The 900P/905P was pretty much the absolute best C: drive money could buy.

Genuinely curious, are disk writes a big part of booting? I'd imagine it to be mostly large sequential reads. Especially since operating systems have a long history of booting from HDD and still need reasonable support for that, I wouldn't expect the boot process has a whole lot of disk thrashing. I also can't think of a reason why it would need to.

Preface: My experience is primarily on Windows (required for, among others, crappy enterprise CAD software). Linux is probably different.

Most developer workstations have had SSDs for many years. This applies to the Windows 10 developers, too. So they haven't paid any real attention to performance regressions on HDDs, since it still works. It's just slow. But it's a HDD so who cares?

That means there's now a lot of I/O going on before and after login, more than would have ever been tolerated in the "old days". Yes, initial boot is just streaming reads, that's easy. But once the OS gets going, it starts logging things... writing. Or finishing up the dregs of the last system update. And NAND SSDs do not handle that mix well at all. They do extremely well with all-reads and very well with all-writes, but a mix will bog them down (block granularity? I don't know why).

Optane doesn't do that. It doesn't care about reads versus writes, or small writes between larger reads. It just goes, and it responds fast no matter what the mix.

It's not really the sort of thing where you notice "wow, this is so fast". It's the sort of thing where you notice randomly sometime that "hey, I've never actually had to wait for this disk". It's harder to notice the absence of pain compared to the pain itself. With Optane, something else is always the bottleneck.

It's not a huge effect, but it was pretty easy to justify the smaller price premium for Optane a few years ago when it was introduced. I fully expected it would carve out a bigger niche for itself at the top of the performance market -- because it really is the top, ahead of anything NAND -- but that hasn't happened. More Intel failings, I guess.

Re: Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

#39

Post by tryptophan »

wmf wrote: post #28
MrStonedOne wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's wise from a long term public good/civic good point of view for consumers to give any sort of apologetic consideration to the business reasons for consumer unfriendly moves. The moment capitalism becomes an excuse for capitalism crony capitalism becomes inevitable. The evils of market segmentation and to a broader degree "value-add" should not be legitimized.

Arguably consumer Optane was a very expensive placebo and thus canceling it is consumer friendly.

Agreed. I have one of those fancy 32gb optane boost drives that supposedly does smart caching.

Can't really tell a difference in performance regardless of whether it is activated or not.

Re: Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

#40

Post by washadjeffmad »

daxfohl wrote: post #32
exmadscientist wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also make glorious boot/OS drives. Those typically see a heavy mix of reads and writes, which is where Optane's dominance over NAND is strongest. The 900P/905P was pretty much the absolute best C: drive money could buy.

Genuinely curious, are disk writes a big part of booting? I'd imagine it to be mostly large sequential reads. Especially since operating systems have a long history of booting from HDD and still need reasonable support for that, I wouldn't expect the boot process has a whole lot of disk thrashing. I also can't think of a reason why it would need to.

Not writes at boot, but the common bottleneck on desktop storage is usually low queue depth IO, which is where Optane excels.

It's not an abundantly high throughput device like NVMe, but for ZIL/SLOG and other caching where it's more about volume of tiny transactions, Optane is very useful.

Of course in enterprise you'd just buy a PCIe card with the characteristics your workloads require which makes Optane very "prosumer", so I understand why Intel would axe the line.

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