Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com) on August 1, 2022 10:15 am wrote:
> Gionatan Danti (g.danti.delete@this.assyoma.it) on August 1, 2022 6:07 am wrote:
> > Adrian (a.delete@this.acm.org) on August 1, 2022 2:15 am wrote:
> > > AFAIK, Intel has never given any information about the materials used.
> >
> > I doubt that material availability or production difficulty were
> > the main motivations after Intel's decision to cancel Optane.
> >
> > From a technical standpoint, even relatively low capacity 3DXPoint can be very useful for non-volatile
> > read or write cache (ie: think using it for storing incoming writes on HDD or SSD).
> >
> > I suppose Intel's decision roots in the fatal reason for many products cancellation: lower
> > than expected margins. It seems a recurring problem for Intel, destroying many products
> > which, albeit very profitable, show less margins than high-priced server CPU.
>
> I think the problem was more "ongoing losses" rather than "profitable, but not enough."
>
> From Tom's Hardware early this year
>
>

Intel's Optane Business Haemorrhaged Over Half a Billion Dollars in 2020
>
> By Mark Tyson published February 07, 2022
>
> Sales were even weaker in 2021. Calculations suggest another $500 million loss occured.

>
> I can also imagine that management doesn't see a path to profitability.
>
> If you are losing money on a product and can't see a way to
> make that product profitable it makes sense to get out.
>
> This isn't the same thing as getting out of a profitable business that
> you don't like because it is too small or not profitable *enough*.

Micron would have gone ahead with it if they thought it could be made profitable.
I think possibly Intel just went through a phase of overestimsting their ability to get things working. After all they did the same thing almost with 14nm where they overestimated their ability to get new ideas working in a reasonable timeframe.