Understanding the Intel Optane Shutdown
Optane was an interesting solution that was still looking for a question. One of the things that drove mass SSD adoption was the experience was plainly better. Even the most illiterate user could see how fucking fast an SSD machine booted and how much more responsive they were.<p>SSD to Optane? There&#x27;s no practical difference. The high end desktop users and serious gamers that have serious cash for their rigs turned up their noses at Optane because it turns out SSD sequential read was good enough for most use cases. At least good enough to not pay 3x more per GB. Nobody really cared about insane sustained write speed when the SLC caches did almost as well in most use cases. Plus as the interfaces scaled up, plain old NAND drives were ready to flood the bus with as much sequential read bandwidth that the bus would take.<p>What could have saved it? I dunno. If Intel wanted to be anti-competitive they could have slapped on 8 PCIe lanes direct to the CPU exclusively for Optane on their desktop products. As we&#x27;ve found out, 4 lanes of NVMe to the CPU and the rest having to go through the chipset is some sort of unfunny, market segmentation joke. It could have forced high end users to grudgingly accept Optane as the path to the absolute best I&#x2F;O and an actual, tangible difference in performance.