In response to some recent false rumors, Intel clarified and said that it would not abandon 3D XPoint and develop a third-generation Intel Optane product that supports Sapphire Rapids.
Since Micron's exit from the 3D XPoint market, Pat Kissinger took over as CEO of Intel, and the company's sale of its NAND non-volatile memory business to SK Hynix, there have been doubts about the future of Intel's other non-volatile memory businesses.
Intel's existing storage-related business is mainly optane SSD and persistent memory business based on 3D XPoint technology. The products are manufactured at Micron's facility in Lehi, Utah, and XPoint R&D is carried out at Intel's Rio Rancho facility in New Mexico. Currently shipping are the second-generation XPoint products, and the third and fourth generations are already on the 2020 Intel product roadmap, although no date is indicated.
▲Optane persistent memory
However, Intel has not talked about its commitment and plans for Optane over the past few months. From a product strategy perspective, Optane persistent memory is limited to connecting to Xeon CPUs and has always been seen as a feature of Intel Xeon CPUs having a competitive advantage over AMD server CPUs, which accelerates application operation by effectively providing Xeon with more memory.
Under Kissinger's leadership, Intel is seeking to regain leadership over AMD processors, and with the help of high-bandwidth memory, the capacity limitations of Xeon DRAM are being eliminated. This means that the strategic imperative to use Optane PMem as a supreme boost is decreasing.
In February, Alper Ilkbahar, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Memory and Storage Solutions Division, which includes Optane's business, resigned. In addition, there is news that Intel Optane 3D XPoint business will lose more than $500 million in 2020.
Intel did not mention or promote Optane at its recent investor conference. Jim Handy of Objective Analysis said: "It's hard to tell how big Intel's commitment to 3D XPoint/Optane is. Since Pat Kissinger took the helm, Intel management has never mentioned Optane in his speech, and this silence can easily elicit outside reverie. Intel is certainly not pushing Optane. ”
On Feb. 24, an interview with Pat Kissinger was published on Ben Thompson's Stratechery blog. Kissinger said in an interview: "I never wanted to get involved in the memory business, and I can see that I am trying my best to exit our storage business. ”
This was followed by a Feb. 28 publication by analyst Tom Coughlin in a Feb. 28 article titled "Will Intel Abandon Optane?" The article, in which he states, states: "Intel will most likely sell the remaining inventory of current Optane products, but will not develop new products for CXL and fifth-generation PCIe." ”
He added that "there are many rumors that the company will not develop new Optane products," concluding that "Intel has not released a new Optane memory product for more than a year, and there has been no significant increase in 3D XPoint's capacity since Micron closed its Lehi plant in 2021." This non-volatile storage technology was once promising, but its related products may be the last generation. ”
Information about Sapphire Rapids in intel investor conference presentations
Based on all of the above, we asked if Intel is still committed to developing Optane and 3D XPoint. In response, Ann Goldman of Intel's Global Communications Division replied, "We will continue to work closely with our customers and partners in memory and storage technology, including 3rd generation Intel Optane products that support Sapphire Rapids." At the same time, we are empowering the ecosystem to prepare for key technologies such as memory tiering based on CXL interconnect technology. ”
This places Optane persistent memory on the CXL bus for use as fast, non-volatile memory for applications running in servers connected to the CXL bus.
As a result, we believe Intel will continue to drive further developments in 3D XPoint.
note
Optane is Intel's brand name for products with 3D XPoint media. This is an implementation of phase change memory. Among them, the state of the sulfur glass material is changed from crystalline to amorphous and back to crystalline again using an electric current. The resistors of these two states are different, i.e. the 1 and 0 used to represent the binary, respectively. Each state is persistent, i.e. non-volatile.
XPoint media is manufactured in cells that are laid out in a 2-layer intersection pattern. Access is faster than NAND flash, but slower than DRAM, and the write time is about three times that of the read.
Optane can be used as a DIMM (persistent memory) connected to the memory bus or as an NVMe-connected SSD.