A shame how Optane / 3D XPoint is now dead. No wonder when the innovation is going down into sewage with QLC and PLC and all sorts of drama around SLC caching and what not, esp TBW.
When Micron exercised the option to buy the fab from Intel, Intel said they would be making the 3D Xpoint themselves after the supply agreement with Micron ended. 3D XPoint is still in Intel's roadmaps, so presumably that's still the case.
Intel does not have any PCIe 4.0 workstation motherboards (aka vendors/partners) yet afaik. AMD does have PCIe 4.0 workstation motherboards (aka vendors/partners) aka Threadripper.
The P5800X is currently marketed for data centers only. But sure, you can always put one into a PCIe 4.0 desktop PC.
Oh and that price premium, $3,600 for a 1.6TB P5800X vs $450 for a top-of-the-line 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, that is a full order of magnitude difference on a per TB basis.
Look at that pyramid of storage levels, OPM sukz at latency, so that is why they still have DDR4/DDR5 as their top memory layer (call that one L4 through to tape which we will call L9).
So a 2U rack mounted motherboard for $29K, two 8380 Xeons at $8K each = $16K (L1, L2, L3) an 8-channel DDR4 memory kit at $2K (L4), 8 OPM 512GB at $2K each = $16K (L5), 8 P5800X 1.6TB at $3.6K each = $29K (L6), 8 D7-P5510 7.68 TB at $1.6K each = $13K (L7) ... total so far = $107K. Yikes.
You are easily talking the upper reaches of five figures to the lower reaches of six figures. Or almost as bad as a tricked out Mac Pro!
So no, Optane will never reach the masses, except as lower level cache for QLC/PLC SSD's going forwards (e. g. good luck finding a PCIe 4.0 Intel SSD in the client space today).
I hope you're a little wrong about that. I wanted a 800P for a boot drive, but just had trouble with it being PCIe 3.0 x2 in the age of PCIe 4.0 and couldn't pull the trigger. Now, it's gone.
Thanks for sharing. It's a shame if they can't get good performance at lower capacities and price points. I want good 4k random QD=1 performance, but also don't want to sacrifice too much sequential speed.
Well, Financial markets do need the best latency numbers they could get, at whatever price, since they compete on who bids faster. There are other fields who do so too. I could imagine there are many niche spots in need of such features. Those systems dealing with large microwave speeds transmissions come to mind and also in broader terms, IoT and electromobility do draw friendly horizons for a variety of unique XPoint needs.
I think Intel is still losing money on it, so that's not great.
The real problem with 3D XPoint is that it's not very 3D. IIRC, the first gen had only 2 layers and the second has only 4. Its density isn't scaling nearly as fast as flash, which is what's at the root of the price disparity.
Out of orders in Servers of over 2.5mil EUR in the last 3 years, we have well over 1000 NVME enterprise SSDs (Mostly 2 and 4TB Intel P drives) and exactly one Optane NVME: a 1.6TB P5800X. That is the level of Optane penetration for our clients. Not that great for Optane.
Have to wonder whether Optane production is ready to go in one of Intel's own fabs, or if they have managed to stockpile enough inventory over the past year or so to bridge any gap in production.
Has Anandtech asked what is Intel's plans for Optane after this? I expect them to have stocked enough for near future but ultimately they have to produce it in house as they have an optane roadmap. These are used in datacenters where they have to provide visibility of future roadmaps.
That said optane looks to be niche for certain workloads. Unfortunately they could not scale it or get power consumption low enough to be used in laptops.
For me, the saddest part of this is Micron leaving the 3D XPoint market. I was hoping they'd sustain the 3D XPoint products needed for non-Intel systems and maybe offer some at more attractive price points than Intel's Optane products.
I wonder how much of this had to do with Micron failing to secure some critical IP, at the time of their split with Intel. I recall there were some nasty lawsuits around poaching of employees or IP theft, following the schism.
"the saddest part of this is Micron leaving the 3D XPoint market" Micron pretty much never ENTERED the market to start with. They shipped a single model (an nVME SSD), two years after Intel first started shipping devices, and never updated it. That's all Micron ever did with the entire Chalcogenide technology stack they effectively stole from Ovonics and then sat on.
That site was a complete waste of money. It sat mostly idle since micron built It in the late 90s early 2000s. Didn't get any use until the Intel partnership, now that partnership is over its idle again. Smart to finally sell it.
Perhaps Micron have dropped XPoint in favor of pursuing more promising storage class memory candidates such as the stealth works going on at Western Digital/ imec.
… have been 5 years away from production for the last few decades
… face exactly the same issues as Optane in competing with flash products that year on year gets cheaper, larger and faster, with PCIe 5 and 6 already in intensive development and nvme SSDs showing no sign of hitting their upper limits as they transition to these new interfaces.
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Kurosaki - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
A shame they couldn't mass produce the chips cheaper. A 2 TB optane drive for 150usd had been revolutionising.mode_13h - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
Wouldn't even have to be that cheap. Just pricing it near Samsung's Pro line would be enough for it to be a significant disrupter.Silver5urfer - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
A shame how Optane / 3D XPoint is now dead. No wonder when the innovation is going down into sewage with QLC and PLC and all sorts of drama around SLC caching and what not, esp TBW.Ryan Smith - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
3D XPoint is not dead. Intel just recently started selling the P5800X for workstation use.YB1064 - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
Where are these being fabbed? TSMC or in-house?jed351 - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
By Micron, they have a supply agreement to followmichael2k - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
That won’t be true much longer since the fab and tooling was just sold off.Yojimbo - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
When Micron exercised the option to buy the fab from Intel, Intel said they would be making the 3D Xpoint themselves after the supply agreement with Micron ended. 3D XPoint is still in Intel's roadmaps, so presumably that's still the case.Everett F Sargent - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
Intel does not have any PCIe 4.0 workstation motherboards (aka vendors/partners) yet afaik. AMD does have PCIe 4.0 workstation motherboards (aka vendors/partners) aka Threadripper.The P5800X is currently marketed for data centers only. But sure, you can always put one into a PCIe 4.0 desktop PC.
Oh and that price premium, $3,600 for a 1.6TB P5800X vs $450 for a top-of-the-line 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, that is a full order of magnitude difference on a per TB basis.
TheWereCat - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
It's still a lot cheaper than RAM and often these are used in DIMM slots instead of a NVMe solution.But I agree, normal people want optane as well...
Everett F Sargent - Friday, July 2, 2021 - link
Yeah, well read this then ...https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en...
Look at that pyramid of storage levels, OPM sukz at latency, so that is why they still have DDR4/DDR5 as their top memory layer (call that one L4 through to tape which we will call L9).
So a 2U rack mounted motherboard for $29K, two 8380 Xeons at $8K each = $16K (L1, L2, L3) an 8-channel DDR4 memory kit at $2K (L4), 8 OPM 512GB at $2K each = $16K (L5), 8 P5800X 1.6TB at $3.6K each = $29K (L6), 8 D7-P5510 7.68 TB at $1.6K each = $13K (L7) ... total so far = $107K. Yikes.
You are easily talking the upper reaches of five figures to the lower reaches of six figures. Or almost as bad as a tricked out Mac Pro!
So no, Optane will never reach the masses, except as lower level cache for QLC/PLC SSD's going forwards (e. g. good luck finding a PCIe 4.0 Intel SSD in the client space today).
mode_13h - Friday, July 2, 2021 - link
> almost as bad as a tricked out Mac Pro!LOL.
> Optane will never reach the masses
I hope you're a little wrong about that. I wanted a 800P for a boot drive, but just had trouble with it being PCIe 3.0 x2 in the age of PCIe 4.0 and couldn't pull the trigger. Now, it's gone.
Everett F Sargent - Friday, July 2, 2021 - link
Intel Reveals Optane SSD P1600X: Entry-Level Boot & Caching SSDshttps://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-launches-o...
" ... PCIe3.0x4 ... "
118 GB
Up to 1760 MB/sec
Up to 1050 MB/sec
Up to 410K
Up to 243K
Put 2 (or 4) of these into a RAID 0 and you might just have something useful?
mode_13h - Saturday, July 3, 2021 - link
Thanks for sharing. It's a shame if they can't get good performance at lower capacities and price points. I want good 4k random QD=1 performance, but also don't want to sacrifice too much sequential speed.mode_13h - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
Sadly, the P5800X is too expensive to be relevant for even most high-end consumers. To us, 3D XPoint effectively *is* dead.: (
Nexing - Friday, July 2, 2021 - link
Well, Financial markets do need the best latency numbers they could get, at whatever price, since they compete on who bids faster. There are other fields who do so too.I could imagine there are many niche spots in need of such features.
Those systems dealing with large microwave speeds transmissions come to mind and also in broader terms, IoT and electromobility do draw friendly horizons for a variety of unique XPoint needs.
eddman - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
I'm rather interested to know how it's doing in the server market.Are there any server people here? How's optane's adoption going? Are there enough use cases for it or is it limited to a niche?
mode_13h - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
I think Intel is still losing money on it, so that's not great.The real problem with 3D XPoint is that it's not very 3D. IIRC, the first gen had only 2 layers and the second has only 4. Its density isn't scaling nearly as fast as flash, which is what's at the root of the price disparity.
scbit - Sunday, July 4, 2021 - link
Out of orders in Servers of over 2.5mil EUR in the last 3 years, we have well over 1000 NVME enterprise SSDs (Mostly 2 and 4TB Intel P drives) and exactly one Optane NVME: a 1.6TB P5800X. That is the level of Optane penetration for our clients. Not that great for Optane.onewingedangel - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
Have to wonder whether Optane production is ready to go in one of Intel's own fabs, or if they have managed to stockpile enough inventory over the past year or so to bridge any gap in production.trivik12 - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
Has Anandtech asked what is Intel's plans for Optane after this? I expect them to have stocked enough for near future but ultimately they have to produce it in house as they have an optane roadmap. These are used in datacenters where they have to provide visibility of future roadmaps.That said optane looks to be niche for certain workloads. Unfortunately they could not scale it or get power consumption low enough to be used in laptops.
mode_13h - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
For me, the saddest part of this is Micron leaving the 3D XPoint market. I was hoping they'd sustain the 3D XPoint products needed for non-Intel systems and maybe offer some at more attractive price points than Intel's Optane products.I wonder how much of this had to do with Micron failing to secure some critical IP, at the time of their split with Intel. I recall there were some nasty lawsuits around poaching of employees or IP theft, following the schism.
edzieba - Wednesday, July 7, 2021 - link
"the saddest part of this is Micron leaving the 3D XPoint market"Micron pretty much never ENTERED the market to start with. They shipped a single model (an nVME SSD), two years after Intel first started shipping devices, and never updated it. That's all Micron ever did with the entire Chalcogenide technology stack they effectively stole from Ovonics and then sat on.
mode_13h - Thursday, July 8, 2021 - link
Sorry, I should have said "walking away from". Yes, they never delivered, in any meaningful sense.xfatal - Thursday, July 1, 2021 - link
That site was a complete waste of money. It sat mostly idle since micron built It in the late 90s early 2000s. Didn't get any use until the Intel partnership, now that partnership is over its idle again. Smart to finally sell it.Blastdoor - Friday, July 2, 2021 - link
It seems the space between flash and RAM is in a volatile state.Passing_by - Tuesday, July 6, 2021 - link
Perhaps Micron have dropped XPoint in favor of pursuing more promising storage class memory candidates such as the stealth works going on at Western Digital/ imec.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, July 7, 2021 - link
Memristors.Tomatotech - Thursday, July 15, 2021 - link
… make Optane look cheap… have been 5 years away from production for the last few decades
… face exactly the same issues as Optane in competing with flash products that year on year gets cheaper, larger and faster, with PCIe 5 and 6 already in intensive development and nvme SSDs showing no sign of hitting their upper limits as they transition to these new interfaces.