News Micron to Sell 3D XPoint Fab to Texas Instruments for $900 Million

[Admin]

Micron announced that it has sold its 3D XPoint (Optane) fab in Lehi, Utah to Texas Instruments.

Micron to Sell 3D XPoint Fab to Texas Instruments for $900 Million : Read more

 

[Giroro]

Intel fumbled Optane so badly, it's a real shame.
They create this amazingly fast storage technology for random reads/writes, but then pair it with outdated first-gen controllers that have subpar sequential performance. When you're selling the most expensive SSD (by far), then it needs to excel in every category.

If you want people to combine an extra module with an HDD, then the pairing needs to be either good enough, cheap enough, or simple enough that people have a reason to buy it over a standard SSD.
Maybe they could have used optane's longevity to take advantage of people wasting money on Chia?

3D Xpoint also could have replaced the SLC cache for a high performance optane/flash hybrid SSDs using a single integrated controller. But instead they glued their slowest optane module to their slowest SSD and said "eh, performance, who needs it? ".

People want this tech, Intel. We have just been waiting for a good-enough product sold at a justifiable price.... With ryzen compatibility.

 

[escksu]

Intel fumbled Optane so badly, it's a real shame.
They create this amazingly fast storage technology for random reads/writes, but then pair it with outdated first-gen controllers that have subpar sequential performance. When you're selling the most expensive SSD (by far), then it needs to excel in every category.

If you want people to combine an extra module with an HDD, then the pairing needs to be either good enough, cheap enough, or simple enough that people have a reason to buy it over a standard SSD.
Maybe they could have used optane's longevity to take advantage of people wasting money on Chia?

3D Xpoint also could have replaced the SLC cache for a high performance optane/flash hybrid SSDs using a single integrated controller. But instead they glued their slowest optane module to their slowest SSD and said "eh, performance, who needs it? ".

People want this tech, Intel. We have just been waiting for a good-enough product sold at a justifiable price.... With ryzen compatibility.

No, I do not think the sequential perform is "subpar" and its a problem. 1 real issues killed Optane, esp for consumer sector.

ITs PRICE..... Its simply way too expensive compared to NAND SSD.

As for performance, its actually pretty good but not enough to justify its price. For consumers, space matters even more than just speed. There is no point in having a fast but tiny storage because it will run out of space very soon.

End-user usage patterns will not allow Optane to shine as well. Optane shines in intensive mixed read/write IO where it will bog down regular SSD. We don't see this in consumer environment. Hence, Optane will perform no different from regular SSD. Sequential Nature of I/O means you won't see much improvement in loading times as well.

As for sequential performance, its actually not an issue for most users. Most only have 1 drive in their computer. So, unless you transfer a massive file to RAM or to another drive, you will never hit that sequential limit.

 

[DavidC1]

@Giroro @escksu

Guys, price and performance would improve over time. You can't get everything right the first time. Actually for sequentials there's evidence that power consumption limited sequential performance. You can see they improved a lot on the second generation.

Back when the 900P drives were introduced, a reliable leaker said that the 900P drives weren't making Intel much money. You get an idea how expensive it is to make.

I don't think Intel was planning single controller for Optane at the time. You still need some amount of DRAM buffer because Optane isn't fast enough to replace it entirely. Designing a proper controller would take years and everything around it so that's why they went the simpler way of putting two controllers on the H10 and H20.

Another problem is they don't have a proper NAND controller anymore. So not only they need to make a competitive NAND controller, but also make it work as a hybrid drive.

The PCI Express also limits the potential of Optane - ultra low latency comparable with DRAM. At least the DIMM versions make some sense.

The biggest problem is whether Intel is going to abandon it. Things are not looking good for Optane right now. I think for the sake of Optane they need to find a way to make it open and be compatible with AMD CPUs, because their server CPUs suck.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

Man, I really liked Optane as a technology, but this sucks.