I worked at Micron in the SSD division when Optane (originally called crosspoint “Xpoint”) was being made. In my mind, there was never a real serious push to productize it. But it’s not clear to me whether that was due to unattractive terms of the joint venture or lack of clear product fit.

There was certainly a time when it seemed they were shopping for engineers opinions of what to do with it, but I think they quickly determined it would be a much smaller market anyway from ssds and didn’t end up pushing on it too hard. I could be wrong though, it’s a big company and my corner was manufacturing and not product development.

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chrneu 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I worked at Intel for a while and might be able to explain this.

There were/are often projects that come down from management that nobody thinks are worth pursuing. When i say nobody, it might not just be engineers but even say 1 or 2 people in management who just do a shit roll out. There are a lot of layers of Intel and if even one layer in the Intel Sandwich drag their feet it can kill an entire project. I saw it happen a few times in my time there. That one specific node that intel dropped the ball on kind of came back to 2-3 people in one specific department, as an example.

Optane was a minute before I got there, but having been excited about it at the time and somewhat following it, that's the vibe I get from Optane. It had a lot of potential but someone screwed it up and it killed the momentum.

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osnium123 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Are you referring to the Intel 10nm struggles in your reference to 2-3 people?

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empiricus 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is actually insane. Do you mean 2-4 people in one department basically killed Intel? Roll to disbelief.

	▲	LASR 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes this is pretty common in large enterprise-ey tech companies that are successful. There are usually a small group of vocal members that have a strong conviction and drive to make a vision a reality. This is contrary to popular belief that large companies design by committee. Of course it works exceptionally well when the instinct turns out to be right. But can end companies if it isn’t.
	▲	wtallis 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		It's somewhat plausible that a small group of people in one department were responsible for the bad bets that made their 10nm process a failure. But it was very much a group effort for Intel to escalate that problem into the prolonged disaster. Management should have stopped believing the undeliverable promises coming out of their fab side after a year or two, and should have started much sooner to design chips targeting fab processes that actually worked.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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rjsw 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A friend was working at Micron on a rackmount network server with a lot of flash memory, I didn't ask at the time what kind of flash it used. The project was cancelled when nearly finished.