Intel Optane is dead on the consumer platform

When Intel introduced its second-generation 3D XPoint products in December, models for consumer were suspiciously missing. It was speculated at the time that Intel had dropped the consumer market and now there's confirmation via a product discontinuation notice from Intel.

Tom's Hardware notices Intel is killing all Optane-only products for the consumer market. As a replacement, Intel suggests the Optane Memory H20, which is a cache drive that combines a bit of Optane with QLC NAND flash memory.

Intel has already stopped taking orders for Optane-only consumer SSDs and will ship the last batch on February 26, 2021.

The last orders will ship on February 26, 2021, for all models. All of Intel's discontinued consumer drives come with the first-gen Optane Memory (3D XPoint), but the company recently unveiled its new Optane SSD P5800X for servers. This new drive brings second-gen Optane to market for the first time, signaling that Intel remains committed to using the exotic memory for the enterprise market. For now, it doesn't appear that the second-gen Optane will come to the desktop PC.