Intel did a spectacularly poor job with the ecosystem around the memory cells. They made two plays, and both were flops.

1. “Optane” in DIMM form factor. This targeted (I think) two markets. First, use as slower but cheaper and higher density volatile RAM. There was actual demand — various caching workloads, for example, wanted hundreds of GB or even multiple TB in one server, and Optane was a route to get there. But the machines and DIMMs never really became available. Then there was the idea of using Optane DIMMs as persistent storage. This was always tricky because the DDR interface wasn’t meant for this, and Intel also seems to have a lot of legacy tech in the way (their caching system and memory controller) and, for whatever reason, they seem to be barely capable of improving their own technology. They had multiple serious false starts in the space (a power-supply-early-warning scheme using NMI or MCE to idle the system, a horrible platform-specific register to poke to ask the memory controller to kindly flush itself, and the stillborn PCOMMIT instruction).

2. Very nice NVMe devices. I think this was more of a failure of marketing. If they had marketed a line of SSDs that, coupled with an appropriate filesystem, could give 99% fsync latency of 5 microseconds and they had marketed this, I bet people would have paid. But they did nothing of the sort — instead they just threw around the term “Optane” inconsistently.

These days one could build a PCM-backed CXL-connected memory mapped drive, and the performance might be awesome. Heck, I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to get a GPU to stream weights directly off such a device at NVLink-like speeds. Maybe Intel should try it.

>Which is weird....

It isn't weird at all. I would be surprised if it ever succeed in the first place.

Cost was way too high. Intel not sharing the tech with others other than Micron. Micron wasn't committed to it either, and since unused capacity at the Fab was paid by Intel regardless they dont care. No long term solution or strategy to bring cost down. Neither Intel or Micron have a vision on this. No one wanted another Intel only tech lock in. And despite the high price, it barely made any profits per unit compared to NAND and DRAM which was at the time making historic high profits. Once the NAND and DRAM cycle went down again cost / performance on Optane wasn't as attractive. Samsung even made some form of SLC NAND that performs similar to Optane but cheaper, and even they end up stopped developing for it due to lack of interest.

It feels like everyone figured out what to do with them and how just about when they stopped making them.

I never understood what they're meant to do. Intel seemed to picture some future where RAM is persistent; but they were never close to fast enough to replace RAM, and the option to reboot in order to fix some weird state your system has gotten itself into is a feature of computers, not a problem to work around.

In "databases and journals" you rarely update just one byte, you do a transaction that updates data, several indexes and metadata. All of that needs to be atomic.

Power failure can happen in between any of "1 byte updates with crazy latencies." However small latency is, power failure is still faster. Usually, there is a write ahead or some other log that alleviates the problem, this log is usually written in streaming fashion.

What is good, though, is that "blast radius" [1] of failure is smaller than usual - failed one byte write rarely corrupts more that one byte or cache line. SQLite has to deal with 512 (and even more) bytes long possible corruptions on most disks, with Optane it is not necessarily so. So, less data to copy, scan, etc.

[1] https://sqlite.org/psow.html

When most people are running databases on AWS RDS, or on ridiculous EBS drives with insanely low throughput and latency, it makes sense to me.

There are very few applications that benefit from such low latency, and if one has to go off the standard path of easy, but slow and expensive and automatically backup up, people will pick the ease.

Having the best technology performance is not enough to have product market fit. The execution required from the side of executives at Intel is far far beyond their capability. They developed a platform and wanted others to do the work of building all the applications. Without that starting killer app, there's not enough adoption to build an ecosystem.

IMO, the reason they didn't sell is the ideal usage for them is pairing them with some slow spinning disks. The issue Optane had is that SSD capacity grew dramatically while the price plummeted. The difference between Optane and SSDs was too small. Especially since the M.2 standard proliferated and SSDs took advantage of PCI-E performance.

I believe Optane retained a performance advantage (and I think even today it's still faster than the best SSDs) but SSDs remain good enough and fast enough while being a lot cheaper.

The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS.

Optane didn't sell because they focused on their weird persistent DIMM sticks, which are a nightmare for enterprise where for many ordinary purposes you want ephemeral data that disappears as soon as you cut power. Thet should have focused on making ordinary storage and solving the interconnect bandwidth and latency problems differently, such as with more up-to-date PCIe standards.

Optane was a victim of its own hype, such as “entirely new physics”, or “as fast as RAM, but persistent”. The reality felt like a failure afterwards even though it was still revolutionary, objectively speaking.