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It's sad that they are essentially killing off Optane on the high end / performance client market (the H20 is more entry & mid level mass market, hindered by QLC and the Optane cache driver not supporting any form of RAID). The 905p was a great and interesting product, but it was lacking in traditional storage performance (MB/s and IOPS) for quite a while, and has newly become outdated by only supporting PCIe 3.0. It had superb latency and endurance, but those are quite niche metrics which don't really do enough to compensate for it having lower traditional performance than top end PCIe 3.0 3D TLC (e.g. Firecuda 510 or WD_BLACK SN750), especially considering the price of it.
Now that there are plenty of PCIe 4.0 devices on the market, it looks positively slow on traditional performance compared to top end devices (e.g. Firecuda 520 or WD_BLACK SN850). Both of those (and their PCIe 3.0 predecessors) have decent enough endurance that they should last 5 years for all but the very heaviest use cases. The WD_BLACK offers higher performance, the Firecuda offers higher endurance; so you even have opportunity to pick your preferred balance. I'm pretty sure Samsung and the other premium SSD vendors can compete well against those, giving yet more choice, just picked the two old storage titans. Very roughly, Seagate & WD are putting out double the traditional performance numbers of the 905p on their spec sheets.
It's a real shame that Intel didn't put out a 910p on PCIe 4.0. They can clearly get the performance out of Optane on the server side, but it's ridiculously expensive unless you're talking about a serious workstation (the big Xeons, EPYC, or Threadripper pro), well above enthusiast HEDT. Those server Optane devices have sky high endurance, so I can't help wondering if they couldn't have sacrificed a big chunk of endurance while keeping the performance, to produce a price competitive PCIe 4.0 high end client offering. Their new 670p sounds quite mid range, probably a very good product, but not really a top tier product.
(I focussed on traditional R/W MB/s & IOPS a lot above, as the reviews out there for the 900p & 905p all placed the Optane latency and endurance into an extremely narrow niche where it actually made a big difference. It's undoubtedly fantastic performance, but general use cases don't seem to get a massive benefit from it, they need strong traditional numbers.)
RIP client Optane, we barely got to know you.
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