Well trick is optane was terrible as ram and pricey as storage.From what I can tell it was targetted:<pre><code> * where persistence was important, better than ram
 * for cases where more ram didn&#x27;t help
 * for cases where adding multiple NVMe didn&#x27;t help
 * for cases where QD1 was very important (as opposed to qd32 throughput).
 * for cases that didn&#x27;t need too much storage, which would break the bank
</code></pre>
I got close for various database use, zfs caches, etc. But never quite beat buying more ram or 2-4x the NVMe. I tried. It was a pretty narrow niche.

I find it very frustrating that people expect new technologies to immediately beat existing ones on every metric, when the existing ones have the advantage of a long timeline of iterative refinement. Optane looked amazing, but it just wasn’t given enough time to go through that process. I know it’s a function of how the market works, but it’s still sad to see promising things die on the vine like that.

Optane is still faster for random IO (latency, peak and average) than any pcie5 modern consumer SSD by quite a bit. Some enterprise SSD are about equal but come with equal cost and size constraints.

Optane was too expensive for not enough of an improvement. It either needs to be as cheap as flash or it needs to be so much faster that people are willing to pay a premium (say, as much faster than an SSD as an SSD was faster than an HDD).

Is the latency in flash devices really from the charge trap physics itself? I thought it was more in all the overhead to make sure the bit(s) are actually what it seems like. Also, if there were a market for low latency storage surely Optane wouldn&#x27;t have died and we&#x27;d be living a better, more random read&#x2F;write performant world.

There&#x27;s a lof of innovation in optical interconnect, including at the chip-to-chip and die-to-die levels:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eetimes.com&#x2F;silicon-photonics-and-co-packaged-optics-shine-a-light-at-ofc-2025&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eetimes.com&#x2F;silicon-photonics-and-co-packaged-op...</a>

As I understand it, moving bits across busses is already more costly than computing [0] and this is expected to continue to be the case.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiengineering.com&#x2F;increasing-ai-energy-efficiency-with-compute-in-memory&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semiengineering.com&#x2F;increasing-ai-energy-efficiency-...</a>

It’s nice to see how the AI ‘hype’ is accelerating (no pun intended) technology like storage…but at what point does processing become the bottleneck and not storage?
Is that not already the case?

Researchers develop picosecond-level flash memory device