Intel Corp (INTC)

[morrowinder]

DavidA2: I agree on yields...

But the problem for Optane is that it is a bit of an odd duck. It is interesting as a cache drive. And it is very interesting for certain server workloads. The endurance is not as good as expected but it is also fine for SSD like workloads. I am not sure making it available for cheaper chips would make that much difference. I was there when they originally started showing off the Flash SSD caches. I thought it was a great product but it never caught on and full blown SSDs became cheap enough that they big footed the tech. It did show up in some laptops but it was never a big deal. I fear that Optane will fare the same. And it is a $50 dollar cost adder for the 16GB version which while cheaper than DRAM is a heck of a lot more than Flash. They would never be able to fit that into a retail value sku where even a few dollars matter. The one bit of hope is that larger Optane drives are SOOOOOO expensive right now that the cache version is much more attractive to DIY folks but Hp and Dell probably won't bother with it. I think the big problem was that Intel massively overhyped this technology and the final product was nothing near what Intel initially promised. Maybe it gets better with the next revision. And I agree on the idle power usage. It looks to be a poor product for mobile in its current state. I am not sure what went wrong but something is fishy.