Like Itanium, it was one of those Intel projects that was simultaneously too ambitious and not ambitious enough.
If Intel really wanted to redesign the Von Neumann architecture, they would have had to be prepared to absorb losses for much longer, way north of a decade.
The alternative might have been to focus exclusively on providing SSDs using the new technology and maybe try to segue into this new memory architecture 10 years later. Like Itanium should have initially focused on beating competing x86_32 chips of the era in benchmarks and ship the new ISA as an afterthought.
Thank you, Intel, for trying to push the envelope, though.
The other similarity was that they needed to treat developers like VIPs: Itanium failed in part because almost nobody was interested in paying a premium for a slow chip, licensed compiler, and then spend their time optimizing code to match competing chip’s out of the box performance. In both cases, they really needed to flood developers with free hardware & help - especially open source developers working on things like databases where you could see the most wins.
People might have bought Optane if the pitch was “Postgres/MySQL runs twice as fast” rather than hoping someone else would make your purchase cost-effective later.
I think it will be basically impossible to move away from von Neumann unless you control the entire stack, including OS and software. I don’t even think Apple could do it with Mac, because they are general purpose machines (for now at least). Maybe Apple could do it with iOS devices. Nintendo might be able to pull it off, though people trying port titles from other platforms may no longer try to do so. Because so many AAA titles go between XBox and PS, I don’t think Sony would try.
I'm not sure if Sony would want to make a system with a very unique architecture again. Devs complained about how hard it was to program PS2 games, and again with PS3. PS4 and 5 are practically PCs by comparison.
I don’t want to say that we’ll never see big architecture changes again but I think a company like Sony would want more confidence that they’d get real advantages. Cell wasn’t just unpopular with developers but also never delivered compelling performance; I suspect if they’d had a PC CPU and a Blu-ray player at the same price it would’ve sold identically.
Anyone trying this needs to figure out a decade-long schedule with points where something would be worth using for some reason so they don’t have to run the whole thing in a vacuum hoping it’ll be worth it at the end.
At the very least wait for CXL to become commonplace before you get ready to cancel, since that's the kind of interface that is a perfect fit for optane.
If Intel really wanted to redesign the Von Neumann architecture, they would have had to be prepared to absorb losses for much longer, way north of a decade.
The alternative might have been to focus exclusively on providing SSDs using the new technology and maybe try to segue into this new memory architecture 10 years later. Like Itanium should have initially focused on beating competing x86_32 chips of the era in benchmarks and ship the new ISA as an afterthought.
Thank you, Intel, for trying to push the envelope, though.