Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Replacements Planned

Re:Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Re... by singhrac on Saturday January 16, 2021 @06:47PM (#25806666)

Are gaming enthusiasts a small market (in dollar terms)? I think the move is probably somewhat reasonable in terms of cutting costs, but I wonder why they didn't just license the technology to someone with experience selling to gamers (e.g. Corsair).

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Re:Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Re... by ksec on Saturday January 16, 2021 @07:10PM (#25806784)

>Are gaming enthusiasts a small market (in dollar terms)?

It is not, the problem is I have yet to see any evidence of benefits. Most consumer and Gaming are Seq Read, which is something modern SSD actually does better than Optane. So Despite Optane having 10x faster Random Read at Queue 1, there are barely any measurable differences in gaming load time or frame rates.

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Re:Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Re... by incrudible on Sunday January 17, 2021 @07:53AM (#25810298)

Most games are still optimized for hard disks, sometimes duplicating assets multiple times to sequentially read them when necessary.

The latest consoles have SSDs+APIs that outclass anything available on PC today, so you might see fast NVMe SSDs as a requirement in the future. Even then, games will be optimized for the latency of SSDs, not Optane.

In short: No, that's not a market.

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Re:Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Re... by tomnipotent on Saturday January 16, 2021 @08:47PM (#25807305)

PC gaming market is about the size of the console market.

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Re:Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Re... by joveian on Saturday January 16, 2021 @11:51PM (#25808246)

But people who would buy special equipment that isn't price competitive with non-"gaming" alternatives is only a small portion of that.

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