Intel is is liquidating its Optane memory business and the development of related 3D XPoint technology, according to a note issued in the latest quarter’s financial results and a subsequent explanation published by Anandtech.

Intel announced its Optane memory and 3D XPoint technology in 2015 as the first category of non-volatile memory created since the introduction of NAND flash in 1989. Created from the ground up by Intel and Micron, this technology combined the advantages of performance, density, performance, stability and price of all memory technologies available on the market at the time.

Intel claimed that 3D XPoint was “up to 1000 times faster, up to 1000 times higher resistance than NAND and 10 times denser than conventional memory”. and as a result promised to revolutionize the use of any device, application or service that would benefit from fast access to large data sets.

If you get lost in all the technical and marketing data, we remind you that Optane memory was basically a small module that acted as a flash memory unit between the storage unit and the RAM. We had a chance to review some of these solutions, such as the Intel Optane Memory H10, and it, well, only improved performance on heavy workloads and not as much as it promised.

Considering that SSDs have a small additional memory that acts as a cache, in our product analysis we asked whether This type of technology was necessary. against the latest generation of NVMe SSDs, and we believe Intel itself knew the answer: No.

Goodbye Intel Optane memory

Industry and consumer adoption of this technology has been very lukewarm from the beginning, and the situation has worsened with the passage of time and the massive implementation of solid state drives. If Optane memory was launched five years earlierwhen hard drives were the bottleneck of computer equipment, this would be a real revolution.

When Optane hit the market, the industry was already churning out SATA SSDs and PCIe was on the horizon. Today, once SSDs have done away with hard drives, this type of technology is simply unnecessary, does not improve performance and represents an additional cost that the industry does not support. Intel is aware of this line of business and therefore it is restricted:

“We continue to streamline our portfolio to support our IDM 2.0 strategy. This includes evaluating the sale of businesses that are not sufficiently profitable or not critical to our strategic goals. After careful consideration, Intel plans to halt future product development under its Optane business. We are committed to supporting Optane customers during the transition.”

The reality is that Intel has spent most (if not all) of its life betting on this technology. There is no breakdown of the results, but outside media say that Intel has a large surplus of 3D XPoint chips, at least two years of inventory that it was unable to sell, and had to introduce a $559 million charge to the line to cancel the line.

Summary: Death Foretold. Optane memory would have been a revolution if it had come a few years earlier to improve the performance of hard drives. Today, with very fast PCIe SSDs dropping in price per GB and with the new PCIe 5.0 on the way out, Intel’s technology proposition, while promising at the time, makes no sense today.