alt Hacker NewsI never understood why some fraction of technologists seem convinced that Optane was this amazing thing that would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.
It never made sense. It's slower than RAM, and what do I get for it? Persistence? I don't want persistent RAM, I like the ability to reboot to solve problems, and storing stuff on a non-volatile mediums has all sorts of legal implications which it's easier to avoid.
It's more expensive and has less storage than SSDs, even though the main downside of SSDs is their high price per gigabyte and relatively low capacities.
It's going in the wrong direction for both use cases. I guess it could have a very niche use case as a super fast persistent caching layer in front of spinning rust but that's kinda it.
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Optane was cheaper than DRAM per bit.
If Intel had volume production of Optane and had been able to quickly reconfigure it to produce a device that could stream out model weights fast enough for inference or could have gotten a read-write device that could hold KV caches effectively, they could have made an absolute killing in the current market.
HBF is slowly going after the former market. I'm not sure flash has a great answer for the latter due to endurance issues.
I can't think of any company that is as good as Intel at having a technology that's ready or almost ready at or before the time that the market is ready for it and then completely failing to sell the product into the newly developed market.
> what do I get for it? Persistence?
Density. PCM is closer in bits-per-unit-area to Flash than to DRAM.
Very low latency, extreme durability, super high IOPS. It's SLC without the problems of SLC. The problem is it was a bit early, the interfaces never were fast enough (x4 3.0), and software that could have benefitted from massive amounts of it greatly, came out too late for it.
The actual problem is Intel was in such a bad position, they needed to shed weight, and Optane was not quick money.
Huh. I wrote a whole thing here about serving a niche in serving local LLMs, but turns out, any niche it could have served is probably better served (per dollar) by either more RAM or modern SSDs.
There's an argument to be made for the persistent memory being a cheaper substitute for more RAM, but imo the gap isn't big enough to justify it when considered as a % of the rest of the system you're building around it and the performance tradeoff.
Important reminder to check your biases. I was sure Optane had missed its mark by dropping out just before LLMs became a primary use case for high $ systems.
Seems halfway between SSD and RAM just like SSD is halfway between RAM and HDD. There's no fixed number of tiers in the storage hierarchy.
IIRC when it came out it was faster than the SSDs you could buy. It never really got that much better and then SSD mostly caught up.
The other answers are hinting at it, but Optane was fundamentally much much lower latency than NAND flash used in SSDs.
SSDs use lots of tricks to hide this latency (using RAM). However, when the data is super critical, you can't just throw some data in RAM and hope that it gets written out.
Enterprise flash drives have battery backups and keep the system alive for a moment to flush out the writes, but Optane doesn't need special tricks to get this sort of durability, it just has it. The Optane can keep accepting writes, eventually the RAM of the SSD is filled, and then the write performance falls off a cliff. However, if your workload gives the storage device a breather to write out to flash, you wouldn't notice the difference.
If you have a large stream of critical data flowing in that has to be stored and can't be lost- Optane suddenly looks way better than SSDs
It's mostly not competitive by virtue of being old, but for specific use cases it still stomps the latest Gen5 nvme drives. Specifically on things that need low latency and fast QD1 performance.
Think metadata in a ZFS array or database writes.
Also crazy endurance - often an order of magnitude beyond even enterprise nvmes.
...and because the things are basically un-killable thanks to endurance you can safely pick up 2nd hand used ones.
So they're a neat trick if used in precisely the right application. Hence:
>some fraction of technologists
>would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.
Maybe - it would presumably have improved further for niche cases, but doubt it would have conquered mainstream markets.
You can have very large MoE models run on small amounts of ram (or vram), if you can transfer the experts you need on the fly from ram to disk.
SSDs are good, but an improved Optane would've been better.
Sometimes, things are just cool.
It somewhat (maybe) had sense for HDD caching but I don't think HDDs in 2026 are used in cases where separate cache is needed.
Having a very low latency, durable write destination is a superpower for lots of database architectures (or things that share architectural details with databases, like some filesystems).
Optane had much lower latency than other types of durable storage, and also had very good endurance compared to NAND.
At a prior employer, we made extensive use of them as ZFS SLOG drives for large database servers. They made fsync very inexpensive.