In memoriam: Intel Optane

I’ve been working on a prototype of a potential type of RAM as part of Stanford’s Differentiated Access Memory (DAM) Project, and this project keeps bringing me back to a sadly killed Intel attempt: OptaneOr to hear about it from Intel themselves, here is one of their marketing materials. .

I tend to run in nerdy tech circles where people know what Optane is (and have strong opinions on itshocking, I know! ). That said, the internals of Optane are a bit nebulous, even to friends in these circles, and I have necessarily become fairly well versed in the design of Optane over the last couple weeks.

So, without further ado,

What is Optane?

In the most technical jargony terms, Optane is a phase-change memory technology, 3D X-Point, packaged as either an M.2 SSD or as a DIMM.

Let’s unpack some of the jargon here. Phase-change memory is a kind of non-volatile memory that physically changes the bit material between a crystalline and amorphous structure to represent 0s and 1s. Both M.2 (Module, 2nd gen?) and DIMM (Dual In-line Memory Module) really just refer to the physical packaging of the hardware. M.2 SSDs are 22mm across, and DIMMs are what you think of when you think of a “stick of ram”.

In more hand-wavey terms, Optane was Intel’s attempt at building a new storage class that could fit somewhere in between traditional DRAM and SSDs.

What do

Why wasn’t it successful commercially?

How did Optane (DIMMs) work?

One paragraph tld;r.

Fin.

References

https://www.sysdevlabs.com/articles/storage-technologies/what-is-intel-optane/