Intel schedules the end of its 200-series Optane memory DIMMs — shipments to draw to an end in late 2025

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3D XPoint memory is disappearing over the horizon.

Intel
(Image credit: Lenovo)

Intel is gradually phasing out its 3DXPoint-based products. The vast majority of Optane-branded solid-state drives have already been discontinued, but there are still some Optane products shipping to customers and they will remain on the market for a while. Last week the company announced plans to end-of-life its Optane Persistent Memory 200-series modules for servers, but its clients will be able to get them through 2025. 

Intel's clients must determine their needs for Intel's Optane Persistent Memory 200-series 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB memory modules (in 4-Pack and 50-Pack SKUs) and make their final orders by December 31, 2024. Intel will ship these modules by December 31, 2025, so the products are not exactly disappearing overnight. 

"Please determine your remaining demand for the products listed in the 'Products Affected/Intel Ordering Codes' table and place your 'Last Product Discontinuance Order' in accordance with the 'Key Milestones' listed above," a statement by Intel reads. "Intel will make commercially reasonable efforts to support last time order quantities for Intel Optane Persistent Memory 200 Series." 

Intel's Optane Persistent Memory 200-series modules are used with the company's 3rd Generation Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) processors to expand memory capacity cost-efficiently. These modules can be used together with regular DDR4 memory modules. 

The Optane Persistent Memory 200-series DIMMs are not Intel's last 3DXpoint-based products. The company is still shipping its Optane Persistent Memory 300-series memory modules compatible with 4th Generation Xeon Scalable 'Sapphire Rapids' processors that can be used alongside DDR5 memory. Since these Optane Persistent Memory modules were released in Q1 2023, and Intel's server platforms tend to have rather long lifecycles, expect 300-series Optane Persistent Memory modules to be available for at least two more years, provided that Intel has enough 3DXPoint memory to build these DIMMs. 

Intel officially discontinued its Optane business in mid-2022 and wrote off equipment worth $559 million as part of its broader strategy to focus on profitable and strategically important businesses. Neither Intel nor its development partner Micron are currently producing 3D XPoint memory (as Micron sold its 3D XPoint fab to Texas Instruments, which does not produce memory), so there will be no new Optane-based products. What remains to be seen is for how long Intel can continue shipping Optane-branded products to its customers.  

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Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

12 Comments Comment from the forums
  • usertests
    https://www.techpowerup.com/245256/wishful-thinking-disingenious-marketing-intels-optane-being-marketed-as-dram-memory
    Anyone here used a consumer system that came with 4-8 GB DRAM and 16 GB of Optane?
    Reply
  • JRStern
    Shipments?
    Who knew?
    Reply
  • purposelycryptic
    Optane/3DXPoint is such a cool tech, it really is depressing it for dead-ended with a company that won't even use it.

    Optane cache drives were great - insane endurance, latency and random R/W speeds, exactly what you need in a cache drive. I wish they were still making them, or even that the ones they did make were available anywhere at a remotely reasonable price.

    My home server is too antique to use either of the DIMM types available, and only supports up to 512GB of RAM, which it has, so I wouldn't want to replace any in it.

    But newer systems can run higher-capacity DIMMs, so I could run the same amount of RAM or more, and still use some high-cap Optane DIMMs in direct mode as a makeshift cache drive.

    My current build is still holding up pretty well for my purposes, but it might slowly be getting time to upgrade to something just a wee bit newer (this decade), migrate the newer hardware to that (GPU, NIC, TPUs), and use the old one as a seriously overpowered direct-connected NAS - all 24 drive bays are full already anyway, and at about 40% free space. Then I could give the new box some Optane love...

    Really just thinking out loud here though (or, well, out quiet since I'm typing). Started doing that way too often since the Long Covid Brain Fog hit me...
    Reply
  • purposelycryptic
    usertests said:
    https://www.techpowerup.com/245256/wishful-thinking-disingenious-marketing-intels-optane-being-marketed-as-dram-memory
    Anyone here used a consumer system that came with 4-8 GB DRAM and 16 GB of Optane?
    Have not heard good things about systems using Optane as a RAM alternative, though I haven't used one personally, just word of mouth. Especially in the slot-limites laptops that they were sold in somewhere surreptitiously for a while, with configurations like you mentioned.

    The better use, from my perspective, is in a system where you can put as much RAM as you need in a single channel, then loading up the other channel with high capacity Optane DIMMs, and run them in App direct mode, either as a secondary non-volatile memory pool, or as a low-latency cache drive or similar. That's assuming your system let's you do that. You lose a memory channel, which isn't exactly perfect, but depending on your needs, it can be a worthwhile trade-off.
    Reply
  • abufrejoval
    Optane is fascinating in that it actually did ship, even if it failed to be competitive against HP's memristor, which was going to be better than DRAM in every which way...

    I remember listening completely stunned to Martin Fink's presentation 10 years ago, and that included a session with a full round of industry leaders who he told that everything from tape to DRAM was going to be replaced with memristor modules at SRAM speeds and below Flash power requirements.

    All those guys didn't raise a single doubt, although they had little to say...

    The memristor didn't have any of the disadvantages of Optane, slower speed, still limited endurance, higher energy consumption, Intel-only support etc. so I never really considered Optane, since it was obviously only second best.

    And Intel refusing to admit that it was phase change technology because they had patent issues in the back, didn't help.

    I'm still sad the memristor turned out a phony, but I'm glad I didn't go the Optane rabbithole (or Apache pass) as otherwise I surely would have.

    I can't think of another time when the public had been so cheated as to the potential of an IT technology...

    ...except AI, perhaps?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    purposelycryptic said:
    My home server is too antique to use either of the DIMM types available, and only supports up to 512GB of RAM, which it has,
    OMG, why??

    purposelycryptic said:
    My current build is still holding up pretty well for my purposes,
    Which are?

    purposelycryptic said:
    The better use, from my perspective, is in a system where you can put as much RAM as you need in a single channel, then loading up the other channel with high capacity Optane DIMMs,
    Well, if you're not actually going to use it as RAM, then I think you might as well go with NVMe interface, due to all the syscall overhead that file I/O adds anyway. That would also leave your RAM slots free for actual DRAM.
    Reply
  • Li Ken-un
    expect 300-series Optane Persistent Memory modules to be available for at least two more years, provided that Intel has enough 3DXPoint memory to build these DIMMs.
    lol what?

    the 300-series was killed in its crib. I tried looking for them while entertaining the idea of a Sapphire Rapids server. These died the very same month they were launched. Nobody is selling them from what I can tell, so the last platform for PMem is effectively Ice Lake on the 200-series.
    Reply
  • DavidC1
    usertests said:
    https://www.techpowerup.com/245256/wishful-thinking-disingenious-marketing-intels-optane-being-marketed-as-dram-memory
    Anyone here used a consumer system that came with 4-8 GB DRAM and 16 GB of Optane?
    Yes, I specifically bought a motherboard for that purpose. It worked well enough.

    The biggest issue was not performance but the fact that when it stopped working, then I would need to connect my drive to another computer to get it working. I'm a techie so if I have a problem it's a no-go for regular computers.

    What they needed to do was actually make it like memory because even the Optane Memory modules had low enough latency to use as "Slow memory". So it should have been an extra slot that the system uses if it runs out of memory and uses as a pagefile, plus the caching portion. Then they could have marketed it to many more people.

    Version 2.0 would be one where you could put it in your DIMM slots for true "Slow DIMMs". Without the support of the mass market, it would never reach the dreams of being cheap enough.

    The thing died partially because of bad strategy on Intel's part. They have the ability and creativity to bring new technology into the market but not enough to actually make it successful.
    bit_user said:
    Well, if you're not actually going to use it as RAM, then I think you might as well go with NVMe interface, due to all the syscall overhead that file I/O adds anyway. That would also leave your RAM slots free for actual DRAM.
    Then actually use it like RAM. The Optane PMEM DIMM modules were only 2x the latency on read. 200nS, which is 500x faster than NVMe SSDs and 50x faster than Optane Memory.
    purposelycryptic said:
    Optane/3DXPoint is such a cool tech, it really is depressing it for dead-ended with a company that won't even use it.
    Sorry but reports were even the $1000 905P drive didn't make much money for Intel. Expecting to be much cheaper is unrealistic without Intel subsidizing it for years, and then only coupled with brilliant strategies.

    Anyway as soon as Gelsinger became CEO, it was bound to die. Gelsinger was under tutelage of Andy Grove, who steered the company away from Memory. Gelsinger said "I never want to be in memory". Because only the #1 company Samsung makes any sort of money on it and for others is a very difficult and low margin business.

    Yea it's good that they got out.
    Reply
  • sukebe
    Title should be:
    Soon to be unOptanium
    Reply
  • Li Ken-un
    sukebe said:
    Soon to be unOptanium
    The writing’s on the wall for the NVMe SSDs too. A whole bunch of SKUs got delisted from my usual haunts a couple months back. We’re left with 905P/P1600X, courtesy of NewEgg, a few of the lower-capacity P5800X*, and the wild west that is eBay. It’s not entirely unobtainable, but you’re going to be rolling the die with unfamiliar onine vendors.

    * The 3.2 TB P5800X specifically, which I’ve kept tabs on for a while, is mostly relegated to lesser known vendors.

    bit_user said:
    Well, if you're not actually going to use it as RAM, then I think you might as well go with NVMe interface, due to all the syscall overhead that file I/O adds anyway. That would also leave your RAM slots free for actual DRAM.
    lol this ^

    When the file system becomes the bottleneck… that’s… :SMH:
    Reply