Optane, the reminiscence expertise pioneered and championed by Intel, has seen its final days. Intel has determined to wind down the expertise as a part of a refocusing effort.
The information got here on an earnings name with analysts to debate Intel’s rocky second quarter. Since Pat Gelsinger has taken the reigns at Intel, the corporate has divested itself of McAfee (though that course of started earlier than Gelsinger arrived) in addition to shed its drone enterprise, NAND merchandise, RealSense visible sensors, and Intel Sports activities.
“We proceed to rationalize our portfolio in assist of our IDM 2.0 technique. This contains evaluating divesting companies which might be both not sufficiently worthwhile or not core to our strategic targets. After cautious consideration, Intel plans to stop future product improvement inside its Optane enterprise. We’re dedicated to supporting Optane clients by way of the transition,” mentioned an Intel spokesperson.
Optane served as a cache between SSDs and reminiscence. As quick as SSDs are, they’re no match for DRAM speeds and have become a efficiency bottleneck. Optane had the storage persistence of NAND flash with practically the velocity of normal DRAM. (Associated: For enterprise storage, persistent reminiscence is right here to remain)
Whereas Optane was technically a lift to efficiency, no Intel competitor used it. Not one of the competitors needed to make use of a expertise that enriched Intel. Intel went by way of an analogous expertise 20 years in the past when it selected Rambus’s RDRAM over the trade customary DDR reminiscence. Intel used RDRAM for all of 1 PC era and nobody else did, so Intel shortly migrated to DDR reminiscence with the following processor era.
“No person desires to be reliant on one firm for a expertise, particularly a commodity like reminiscence,” mentioned Jim McGregor, principal analyst with Tirias Analysis. “If it’s important to depend on one vendor for a expertise and that vendor screws up, you might be hosed. In the event you can’t it get from a number of sources, it’s a dooming assertion for the tech.”
There aren’t any sale figures or put in base numbers accessible for Optane, however reminiscence analysis agency Goal Evaluation places the cumulative loss for Optane from 2015 to 2020 at $6.8 billion. So it’s not laborious to see why Gelsinger pulled the plug.
Gelsinger instructed analysts that with the execution of six enterprise divestitures since he returned to the corporate in 2021, Intel has freed up $1.5 billion for funding in its IDM 2.0 technique of creating chips for different distributors. Its newest win got here final week when it signed up Taiwanese chip large MediaTek.
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