AMD expects to outsell Intel in Q4 for the first time in history (tomshardware.com)

Intel's newest gen is a pretty clear favorite for laptops (especially with their better wifi/bluetooth/USB chipsets). Outside of laptop though, Intel has nothing compelling.

Chicken and Egg problem when everyone else is on TSMC

I like to think that if there are wins to be had, the market will price that in.

Those cards are cheap because they're not really that amazing.

Sometimes, things are just cool.

> what do I get for it? Persistence?

Density. PCM is closer in bits-per-unit-area to Flash than to DRAM.

It somewhat (maybe) had sense for HDD caching but I don't think HDDs in 2026 are used in cases where separate cache is needed.

Having a very low latency, durable write destination is a superpower for lots of database architectures (or things that share architectural details with databases, like some filesystems).

Optane had much lower latency than other types of durable storage, and also had very good endurance compared to NAND.

At a prior employer, we made extensive use of them as ZFS SLOG drives for large database servers. They made fsync very inexpensive.

Huh. I wrote a whole thing here about serving a niche in serving local LLMs, but turns out, any niche it could have served is probably better served (per dollar) by either more RAM or modern SSDs.

There's an argument to be made for the persistent memory being a cheaper substitute for more RAM, but imo the gap isn't big enough to justify it when considered as a % of the rest of the system you're building around it and the performance tradeoff.

Important reminder to check your biases. I was sure Optane had missed its mark by dropping out just before LLMs became a primary use case for high $ systems.

You can have very large MoE models run on small amounts of ram (or vram), if you can transfer the experts you need on the fly from ram to disk.

SSDs are good, but an improved Optane would've been better.

Optane was cheaper than DRAM per bit.

If Intel had volume production of Optane and had been able to quickly reconfigure it to produce a device that could stream out model weights fast enough for inference or could have gotten a read-write device that could hold KV caches effectively, they could have made an absolute killing in the current market.

HBF is slowly going after the former market. I'm not sure flash has a great answer for the latter due to endurance issues.

I can't think of any company that is as good as Intel at having a technology that's ready or almost ready at or before the time that the market is ready for it and then completely failing to sell the product into the newly developed market.

IIRC when it came out it was faster than the SSDs you could buy. It never really got that much better and then SSD mostly caught up.

The other answers are hinting at it, but Optane was fundamentally much much lower latency than NAND flash used in SSDs.

SSDs use lots of tricks to hide this latency (using RAM). However, when the data is super critical, you can't just throw some data in RAM and hope that it gets written out.

Enterprise flash drives have battery backups and keep the system alive for a moment to flush out the writes, but Optane doesn't need special tricks to get this sort of durability, it just has it. The Optane can keep accepting writes, eventually the RAM of the SSD is filled, and then the write performance falls off a cliff. However, if your workload gives the storage device a breather to write out to flash, you wouldn't notice the difference.

If you have a large stream of critical data flowing in that has to be stored and can't be lost- Optane suddenly looks way better than SSDs

It's mostly not competitive by virtue of being old, but for specific use cases it still stomps the latest Gen5 nvme drives. Specifically on things that need low latency and fast QD1 performance.

Think metadata in a ZFS array or database writes.

Also crazy endurance - often an order of magnitude beyond even enterprise nvmes.

...and because the things are basically un-killable thanks to endurance you can safely pick up 2nd hand used ones.

So they're a neat trick if used in precisely the right application. Hence:

>some fraction of technologists

>would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.

Maybe - it would presumably have improved further for niche cases, but doubt it would have conquered mainstream markets.

Very low latency, extreme durability, super high IOPS. It's SLC without the problems of SLC. The problem is it was a bit early, the interfaces never were fast enough (x4 3.0), and software that could have benefitted from massive amounts of it greatly, came out too late for it.

The actual problem is Intel was in such a bad position, they needed to shed weight, and Optane was not quick money.

Honest question, couldn't one just ask Claude to make a better driver for it? And reimplement pytorch on top of that or something?

And they are making great progress on the software side. ROCm 10 is significantly better than 7.x

It's a very small market, and really low margin compared to AI/datacenter. DC GPUs are 90% margin, and bought by the millions.

What? They co-developed Optane with Micron and Micron gave up on it before Intel did.

I'm not surprised.

The board should've sacked the entire leadership team of Intel and AMD years and years ago.

The fact that you can sit through both a mining boom and now a generational AI boom and have little to show for it and still keep your job is a Yahoo!-level fumble.

Interesting data point as a stock holder, thanks.

> The issue is, AMD still pays significantly less than any company with an RTO mandate

I'm sure they pay more than Intel ;-)

Everything I've read so far just has me believe 75% of the comments didn't even open the article.

It's not the OP's story, but it's also not the first story of things hosted at Hetzner being intercepted. Best to not host "such" things there, since they seem quite compliant in that regard: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/ (comments at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37955264 )

Yep, physical access = game over. A tale as old as time. It doesn't matter who etched the silicon.

There's also no way around a $5 wrench, but you'd be hard pressed to find that wrench for $5.

There are many years since AMD's EPYC CPUs have been greatly superior to Intel's Xeons and Intel has not succeeded to match them (Intel has a hope with the future Diamond Rapids Xeons, which are their first CPUs since 2019 that have a good chance to match AMD's).

In the last few years Intel's division that makes Xeons had huge losses, because in order to retain their big customers they had to accept to sell at big discounts, otherwise the customers would have switched to AMD.

All has changed this year, due to the AI craze.

AMD has sold all the server CPUs that it could make, within its allocations at TSMC. Everybody who did not succeed to buy EPYCs has bought Intel Granite Rapids Xeons, because they are not made at TSMC, but in Intel's fabs, so they did not compete with other TSMC customers for allocations.

So Intel has also sold every server CPU that they could make, and they are now trying to retool some fab that made new Panther Lake CPUs back to the obsolete Intel 3 CMOS manufacturing process, in order to make more Xeons, to sell them as long as this huge demand persists.

Thus in the last quarter both AMD and Intel have sold less consumer CPUs than in the past, because all who could did delay their upgrade plans due to the unacceptable memory prices, but on the other hand both AMD and Intel had record revenues and profits from selling server CPUs.

2026Q2 numbers show Intel falling quickly but still in the mid-60% to 70% in every market: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/desktop-cpu-...

Absolutely. It's also why I like seeing the Arm and Risc processor pressure; forces them to keep upping their game and not get fat and lazy (like Intel did).

As someone at AMD, I think competing on two major fronts helps with that some.

The memory crisis has delayed both Intel's and AMD's consumer CPU launches, i.e. Nova Lake for Intel and Zen 6 for AMD, to next year, but when that will happen there are good chances to see a much stronger competition between them than during the last 6-7 years, because Nova Lake should finally bring back AVX-512, a.k.a. AVX10, to Intel's consumer CPUs, and it also has many enhancements that AMD has not implemented yet (e.g. APX and FRED), so unless Intel fails at execution, the competing Intel and AMD CPUs should be much more balanced than in the last few years.

Is that a known issue? I had something vaguely similar happen with a GPU that had intermittent hardware failure.

Granted their rocm support was abysmal several years back and they lost my trust as a result. But nvidia is hardly any better and intel doesn't seem to be a viable alternative ...

Also Intel decided to not improve for a long time. They were just happy collecting rent and protecting margin. Only the paranoid survive. Intel used to be a memory company and they pivoted cause Andy grove could see what was coming.

AMD benefited greatly from Intel's self inflicted wound: laying on their laurels thinking the leverage they had with OEMs and inertia will carry them through the hard patch like it did in their P4 times.

Intel stopped advancing in 2014-2015 for a long time. They flopped on the fabrication side, they stuck to the 2-4 core CPUs and charged an arm and a leg for anything with more than that. This gave AMD an opening with their cheap and yet still decently fast higher core count CPUs.

>They also stopped making 3D XPoint a year before AI would have bought all of it.

Micron wanted to sell the fab that manufactured 3D XPoint.

It's amusing because i915-derived integrated graphics had the largest GPU share for a long time, but they still tried to make an x86-based GPU instead.

For me, it was core count, price and energy efficiency (especially after a hefty power limit reduction that costs barely any performance). Intel made faster single cores most of the time, but at ridiculous power consumption and lower total core count.