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.

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.

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

Density. PCM is closer in bits-per-unit-area to Flash than to DRAM.

The actual problem is Intel was in such a bad position, they needed to shed weight, and Optane was not quick money.

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.

SSDs are good, but an improved Optane would've been better.

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.