It’s been a year since the announcement that Intel would “Wind Down” its Optane 3D XPoint memories. Has anything risen to take its place? Should it? This presentation reviews the alternatives to Optane that are now available or are in development, and evaluates the likelihood that one or more of these could fill the void that is being left behind. We will also briefly review the legacy Optane left behind to see how that legacy is likely to be used to support persistent memories in more diverse applications, including cache memory chiplets. Along the way we’ll show how Optane not only spawned new thinking on software, as embodied in the SNIA Nonvolatile Memory Programming Model, but also drove the creation of new communication protocols, particularly CXL and UCIe.

Learning Objectives: 1) Understand the growing role of emerging memory technologies in future processors; 2) Learn how Persistence, NUMA, and Chiplets have blossomed in Optane's wake; 3) See how SNIA's NVM Programming Model will support tomorrow's software, even though Optane won't be using it.