Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Rest in Peace, Optane

specbranch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 122 posts

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#31

Post by sgt101 »

I worked at a telco when Optane was announced and launched; we had an Intel account manager and quarterly business meetings with them.

I lobbied hard for some samples, but they simply would not provide them. I think that if we were representative of how they acted this may be the reason they never got buyin. If we had had those parts maybe we would have implemented the POC's we were planning, and those POC's may have made it to production and the portfolio of the time. Perhaps there would have been a good market ready for 2015.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#32

Post by sgt101 »

BTW who else remembers the flap about Memristors and HP Lab's "The Machine" at the time. Disk and memory were definitely going to be abolished by 2020!

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#34

Post by DeathArrow »

Dalewyn wrote: post #11
hardware2win wrote: post #6

What was interesting about Optane was that it was kinda an attempt to get rid of disk and ram distinction. You had single device (optane stick) which served as both - ram and disk. After decades of current approach we finally could physically get rid of disks - hdds, ssds or even nvme sticks. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/01/optane_intel_cancella... >Optane presented a radical, transformative technology but bec…

So the winning move now is for Apple to announce iOptane and sweep the data storage and cache industries by storm?

I think they'd rather call it iMemory and jack up the price of the iDevices using it by 25‰.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#35

Post by mrb »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #29

Optane suffered the same fate as every other storage technology over the decades with a similar value proposition. Broadly, the notional value of storage technology like Optane is that it offers a drop-in improvement in storage performance without requiring any software modification, albeit at a significant cost premium. The theory that this market exists in any significant way never pans out in practice. On one hand…

"The theory that this market exists in any significant way never pans out in practice."

The transition from HDD to SSD technology is a counter example to your claim. It was a drop-in replacement (same SATA interface) and the tech significantly improved performance without any other software modification needed.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#36

Post by DeathArrow »

eternityforest wrote: post #27

Why was everyone so obsessed with the idea of Optane as universal memory? From a consumer perspective, it was a fast small SSD that doesn't wear out. That was enough to justify it's value at the prices it went for(Or at least it seems like it, I never personally used it). It didn't need any radical rethink of computing to be worth it. I'm not even a fan of the nonvolatile RAM idea. Rebooting is often the first thing…

I think the idea is to have large persistent storage with the speeds of RAM. Everything would open instantly.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#37

Post by zaphirplane »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #29

Optane suffered the same fate as every other storage technology over the decades with a similar value proposition. Broadly, the notional value of storage technology like Optane is that it offers a drop-in improvement in storage performance without requiring any software modification, albeit at a significant cost premium. The theory that this market exists in any significant way never pans out in practice. On one hand…

What about the 1-10 billion dollar company whose business isn’t technology, like say some mid tier insurance company running MySQL with a combination of off the shelf specialists software and in-house software. They would benefit from faster storage and they can’t tune their stack like Facebook

Obviously it failed as a product but I am not so sure that the cause is as you lay it out

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#38

Post by lstodd »

sgt101 wrote: post #31

I worked at a telco when Optane was announced and launched; we had an Intel account manager and quarterly business meetings with them. I lobbied hard for some samples, but they simply would not provide them. I think that if we were representative of how they acted this may be the reason they never got buyin. If we had had those parts maybe we would have implemented the POC's we were planning, and those POC's may have…

Yeah, this. Intel was all talk and zero samples, not even a demo. So back then we just shrugged and moved on.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#39

Post by anonylizard »

mrb wrote: post #35
jandrewrogers wrote: post #29

Optane suffered the same fate as every other storage technology over the decades with a similar value proposition. Broadly, the notional value of storage technology like Optane is that it offers a drop-in improvement in storage performance without requiring any software modification, albeit at a significant cost premium. The theory that this market exists in any significant way never pans out in practice. On one hand…

" The theory that this market exists in any significant way never pans out in practice. " The transition from HDD to SSD technology is a counter example to your claim. It was a drop-in replacement (same SATA interface) and the tech significantly improved performance without any other software modification needed.

Didn't SSD's get a start with laptops and mobile devices? There the advantage of being shock resistant is massive and unsolvable with any other solution.

For a superior but new tech to stick, it has to find a viable market to be first self-sustaining, only then can it attack larger and more lucrative markets (Back in those days, PC was probably more lucrative than mobile). Only when SSDs matured enough, did they start eating up the entire storage market.

Re: Rest in Peace, Optane

#40

Post by DeathArrow »

choppaface wrote: post #8

Optane is dead. Long live Optane! PCIE 3.0 Optane recently sold so well it got backordered and the price popped. (Ok maybe it was LevelOneTechs Wendell? Maybe it was organic? https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-905p-1-5tb/p/N82E1682016... ) Today PCIE 4.0 prices have fallen so fast that you can RAID0 a few M.2s and get about the same IOPs from a single Optane drive for a similar $ per GB, though not exactly the same…

Well, if Optane wasn't dead, it would not be stalling. If SSD speeds would be improving, so would Optane speeds.
Post reply on HN