[amluto]

Why on Earth did Intel implement this as a 2x2 device? They could have implemented multiple functions or they could have used a PCIe switch or they could have exposed their device as an NVMe device with multiple namespaces, etc. (I won’t swear that all of these would have worked nicely. But all of them would have performed better than arbitrarily splitting the link in half.)

Maybe they didn’t own any of the IP for the conventional SSD part and couldn’t make it play ball?

[wtallis]

The Optane side of the drive used the same x2 controller as the pure-Optane cache drives. The NAND side used a Silicon Motion controller, same as their consumer QLC drives of the era. They almost literally just crammed their two existing consumer products onto one PCB and shipped it. Intel was never interested enough in the consumer applications of Optane to design a good, useful SSD controller around it, and they weren't going to let a third-party like Silicon Motion make an Optane-compatible controller.

[fc417fc802]

Or perhaps they just made a number of incredibly poor decisions. They seem to have been doing that for the better part of a couple decades now.