But a system that only makes sense in super high end configurations is setting an uphill battle for itself. You can't even put together a demo machine without using one of a handful of processors at the top of Intel's stack, how do you even demo that to your boss as a concept? And in the end the commodity solutions just ended up outpacing it at lower cost, flash still sucks at random but it's generally fine and people don't want to pay the extra $500 for optane on their 1tb drive.
Software getting entirely rewritten for NVRAM is a pipe dream lol. Maybe you could have defined a "high range" ala HIMEM that is persistent across boots and will never be allocated, just used it as a block device so your SAP database would never unload, but, yeah, there are non-trivial problems.
This is true; the reason is that the margins on the data center chips are what keeps the lights on.
It would have been very interesting to see an "all Optane" tablet device but it would have been hard to make work: a modest amount of storage would be affordable but it would take a clean sheet OS to maximize performance and economics.
I was skeptical about Optane DIMMs.
Optane SSDs were the fastest SSD you'd ever seen, but the DIMMS were the slowest you'd seen in a while. Although they were faster than Optane SSDs, they were slower than RAM if you replaced RAM 1-1. Optane was denser and cheaper than ordinary RAM so you could pack your machine with a huge quantity of slow RAM.
If access patterns and cache behavior permit, you could build systems of a certain problem size that perform well with Optane. Advanced programming techniques can help.
For every big problem there are many little problems (don't need Optane) and some problems are too big for Optane. Many problems in the size range for Optane can be implemented to conserve RAM and have access patterns that stream well to mass storage. Thus Optane faced fierce competition.