Intel's Optane business is hurtling towards an unglorified end

pcgamer.com:

Intel’s Optane business suffered over half a billion dollars’ worth of losses over the course of 2020 according to figures drawn from Intel’s official 10K SEC filing. The figures come via Blocks and Losses (with thanks to Tom’s Hardware). Blocks and Losses goes on to speculate that the losses continue into 2021. If the predicted $529 million operating loss in 2021 is accurate, then the already shrinking Optane business is down well over a billion dollars over the last two years. 

This is genuinely sad news. From a gaming perspective, many Optane drives were fast. Very fast. In fact, the Optane 900P was PC Gamer’s SSD of the year for 2017. The hallmark characteristics of 3D Xpoint memory was low latency, high in/out operations per second and excellent endurance ratings. These specs were far ahead of those of NAND SSDs from the same period. That made them desirable gaming SSDs, but promising technology is only successful if it's executed properly, and that’s where Intel failed.  

Despite Optane’s appeal and strengths, at the consumer level Intel made some questionable product placement choices. It tried to position Optane drives as cache solutions for hard drives. Enthusiast users and and gamers had already shifted away from mechanical drives to SSDs, therefore cache drives didn't appeal to the group most likely to adopt new tech. At the other end of the spectrum, many budget systems still came with mechanical hard drives. However, budget systems with HDDs came with cheap motherboards. H310 for example didn't offer Optane support. That was a bit odd for sure.

Intel later produced hybrid Optane drives such as the H10 that combined NAND storage with an Optane cache, but again, pairing cheap QLC NAND with 32GB of pricey 3D