Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com) on July 29, 2022 10:02 am wrote:

> I do wonder if there was a fundamental issue where Intel *had* to price this where they did and
> couldn't economically make smaller capacity DIMMs or if this was just a business decision.

I think it was very difficult to fabricate. Possibly very difficult. Otherwise why would Micron not enjoy having a captive fab customer, or Intel spin it up themselves? If I had to speculate further, I'd guess there were some exotic materials involved (as so many NVRAM technologies use), and it was probably those that never scaled/cost-reduced/site-transferred as well as the suits were hoping for.

It's a damn shame, Optane boot drives were the absolute fastest. Everyone talks about the low latency, and it's great, but the real win was no performance penalty for mixed read-write workloads. Which is exactly what happens when you boot a system these days, thanks to all the logging. And that says nothing of updates. I have never seen any other kind of system go through an annoying Windows Update faster than an Optane machine.

3DXPoint will be missed. Even if it never did get cheaper.