Intel’s Optane Business Suffered $576 Million Operating Loss in 2020

[Tsing]

Image: Intel



It’s no secret that Intel’s Optane memory technology hasn’t exactly been a success, but new SEC filings have revealed just how much of a drain that business had been on Intel’s finances back in 2020. As spotted by Blocks & Files, Intel’s annual 10K SEC filing for 2021 reveals that Optane cost Intel over half a billion dollars that year, with operating losses in the region of $576 million. Optane memory was discontinued for the consumer market in January 2021.

Image: Blocks & Files



Optane’s 2020 half billion dollar operating loss (Blocks & Files)



Some gory financial details are laid bare in Intel’s annual 10K SEC filing for 2021...

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[Uvilla]

They have tons of drives just sitting there? Just couldn't expand sales enough?
Kept them too expensive, couldn't reach economy of scale? Something they screwed up, but the product reads quite excellent.

 

[Grimlakin]

Optane came to the market as NVME took off and started dropping in price pretty quickly into near parity with SSD. Once that happened Optane became a solution for Spindle drives and pretty much nothing else. The Consumer market moved away from embracing Optane because our data density isn't that high and an add on that added complication to your storage solution AND additional cost, AND a competing solution that was as fast as if you just spent the money on it to start... Optane was beaten in the market because it couldn't compete, had too narrow of a useful technology window.

Had it released a few years before NVME and drives that embraced it they could have made a bigger impact.

 

[Brian_B]

If they had pushed it (technology and marketing) as a replacement for DRAM and Storage in a combined package, it would have a place. I had thought early on that was where they were aiming.

As just low latency storage, yeah, it's pretty much just server and cache niche.

 

[Zarathustra]

Maybe, just maybe, if they had released more pro-sumer drives, newer versions of the 900p an 905p they could have sold more and made more of a profit?

The 900p and 905p drives are still absolute king for anything requiring low latency, and they still perform better than almost all newer drives in most applications that way more towards responsiveness and IOPS despite their deficit in bandwidth due to being Gen3 only.

I think if they came down in price a little they could do very well in the pro-sumer space.

Make a modern pro-sumer Optane drive. Lets call it the 1000p. Give it gen4 (or even 5) and price it about double the price of Samsungs 980 Pro, and I think it sill sell like hotcakes, and make up for its lower price in numbers.

 

[serpretetsky]

Optane came to the market as NVME took off and started dropping in price pretty quickly into near parity with SSD. Once that happened Optane became a solution for Spindle drives and pretty much nothing else. The Consumer market moved away from embracing Optane because our data density isn't that high and an add on that added complication to your storage solution AND additional cost, AND a competing solution that was as fast as if you just spent the money on it to start... Optane was beaten in the market because it couldn't compete, had too narrow of a useful technology window.

Had it released a few years before NVME and drives that embraced it they could have made a bigger impact.

I dont understand various parts of your post. Optane and nvme are not in competition. Many (most) optane drives use nvme. Optane is competition to NAND flash memory and DDR ram. Optane is not a solution to spindle drives.

Optane still has some crazy numbers for very particular benchmarks. Check out anything have to do with 4k random reads. I'm actually not sure if there are any non-optane drives that can beat it in this department.

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2753?vs=2760

Also: SSD just means solid state drive. It doesn't really specify any technology. Sata or nvme? nand flash MLC/TLC/QLC? nor flash? optane/xpoint?

 

[Endgame]

Maybe, just maybe, if they had released more pro-sumer drives, newer versions of the 900p an 905p they could have sold more and made more of a profit?

The 900p and 905p drives are still absolute king for anything requiring low latency, and they still perform better than almost all newer drives in most applications that way more towards responsiveness and IOPS despite their deficit in bandwidth due to being Gen3 only.

I think if they came down in price a little they could do very well in the pro-sumer space.

Make a modern pro-sumer Optane drive. Lets call it the 1000p. Give it gen4 (or even 5) and price it about double the price of Samsungs 980 Pro, and I think it sill sell like hotcakes, and make up for its lower price in numbers.

I agree completely. If there was a 1000p, I would be so in for a 512GB drive for OS at 399 without question, and I'd probably even consider it at 499. I don't need long sequential read and write on the OS drive, but I do need plenty of random read.

 

[MadMummy76]

LOL, 576 kbyte was actually a gaming magazine we had, also a videogame shop network later. The name originated from combining the RAM of the Amiga and C64 as those were the popular platforms at the time.

 

[Denpepe]

I wanted to go Optane for my OS drive but seeing they are nowhere to be found anymore I dropped that, was curious to see if it made my pc more responsive and if I could actually tell.

 

[Zarathustra]

I wanted to go Optane for my OS drive but seeing they are nowhere to be found anymore I dropped that, was curious to see if it made my pc more responsive and if I could actually tell.

I bought two brand new (or new old stock at least) 280GB 900p U.2 drives on Newegg Marketplace a few months back for $229 each to use as SLOG/ZIL/LOG devices in my server ZFS pool.

You can still get them if you want them, though PCIe versions are quite overpriced and hard to find due to demand. U.2 ones work just as well though. You just need an adapter.

 

[serpretetsky]

You can still get them if you want them, though PCIe versions are quite overpriced and hard to find due to demand. U.2 ones work just as well though. You just need an adapter.

Not saying you're wrong, just clarifying that the U.2 version is still using PCIe signalling. It's just not a conventional PCIe slot.

 

[Zarathustra]

Not saying you're wrong, just clarifying that the U.2 version is still using PCIe signalling. It's just not a conventional PCIe slot.

Of course! What I meant was that it was not in a traditional PCIe slot form factor.