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Micron has announced that it will buy Intel'due south pale in IM Flash Technologies, a articulation venture betwixt the ii companies that'south been responsible for a number of high-profile technologies from both companies. Hybrid memory cube, Optane (aka 3D XPoint) and the Crystal Well SDRAM that Intel mounts on its highest-end integrated GPU solutions are all products of the same joint agreement betwixt the two companies. But the writing has been on the wall for the agreement. Intel and Micron have dissolved their joint agreement to develop NAND flash technologies and announced that they would no longer jointly develop Optane, either, after finishing the second-generation design. IM Flash is the last jointly-endemic foundry and is entirely dedicated to Optane product, which will make Micron Intel's sole Optane supplier.

Anandtech points out that previous agreements between the companies will go on the price Intel pays for Optane steady for a year after the deal closes, after which new price contracts volition have to be negotiated. That's estimated to happen betwixt mid-2020 and early 2022 depending on when the bargain finalizes, and Micron has plans to innovate its own competing products based on 3D XPoint likewise as new emerging memory technologies.

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One potential reason the firms have decided to dissolve their partnership is that they may be eyeing different markets for the memory applied science, with Intel wanting to push into servers and enterprise computing, while Micron wants to emphasize Optane as a solution for smaller applications that require smaller dies. And one reason for the long lead time between when Micron volition buy the fab and when Intel has to negotiate its contracts could exist a deliberate on-ramp for Intel to ramp up its own Optane manufacturing.

Optane is in an interesting position correct now. For general workloads, it isn't ever conspicuously faster than an SSD — with the understanding that in some specific workloads and scenarios, it's considerably faster than ordinary solid country drives. Intel has announced major plans for the standard, including the power to use Optane in DIMM slots as a RAM replacement, and while we were very critical of an advertising change that's seen Optane listed as a DRAM equivalent, the technology overall seems to have promise. And while Intel's marketing has at times been a touch hyperbolic on the benefits, it also seems to take genuinely commercialized a new type of storage memory.

It'due south easier to forget how rare that is, but it really doesn't happen very often. We've used magnetic media for decades in various formats (tape, floppy disks, hard drives), optical media since the early 1990s (CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-ray) and NAND flash at the consumer level since ~2008, with NAND becoming more than widespread over the past decade. And Optane does accept reliability benefits over NAND in theory, though it's non clear how much those benefits matter in the bulk of on-the-ground scenarios (most people don't exceed their SSDs lifetime write cycle limit, for instance).

Intel has stated that it does not expect the Micron buy to accept any bear on on the bring-up of hereafter Optane products.

Now Read: PC OEMs Are Selling Laptops With Optane Cache Drives and Claiming It's Memory, Gigabyte Now Baking 32GB of Optane Straight Into Z370 Motherboards, and Intel Announces New Optane DC Persistent Memory