the fab in which the 3D XPoint chips that go into Optane drives and modules were made. While Intel has signaled it is open to using third-party foundries, without the means to make its own Optane silicon, the writing was on the wall.in May, the sale only came after Micron had saddled Intel with a glut of 3D XPoint memory modules – more than the chipmaker could sell. Estimates put Intel's inventories at roughly two years worth of supply.
Intel also used 3D XPoint in its Optane persistent memory DIMMs, particularly around the launch of its second- and third-gen Xeon Scalable processors. The DIMMs slotted in alongside standard DDR4 and enabled a number of novel use cases, including a tiered memory architecture that was essentially transparent to the operating system software. When deployed in this fashion, the DDR memory was treated as a large level-4 cache, with the Optane memory behaving as system memory.