For those who came in late, even Intel thought that Optane was pointless and spent more than $559 million to shut down the Optane business.

However, the P5810X Series launched sometime in the fourth quarter. Without an explanation from Intel, it's hard to discern why the company has released the two drives (other than you need two of everything to go in the Ark).

The two fresh Optane products are both PCie 4.0 NVMe drives, one with a 400GB capacity and the other an 800GB capacity. Compared with their P5800X predecessors from 2020, they are pretty dull. 

The 800GB P5810X, for instance, offers 1.5 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) for random reads, 1.27 million IOPS for random writes, a sequential read bandwidth of up to 7,200 MB/s, a sequential write bandwidth of up to 5400 MB/s, an idle power of 4.6 watts, and an active power of 24 watts.

2020's 800GB P5800X offered a faster I/O performance for writes of 1.35 million IOPS, a higher sequential write bandwidth of up to 6100 MB/s, and the same I/O performance and sequential bandwidth for reads. The power consumption is less too, with an idle power of 4.2 watts and an active power of 18 watts.

The 400GB P5810X offered an upgrade for write I/O performance and bandwidth from its P5800X predecessor. The new 400GB drive offers 1.5 million IOPS for reads, 1.38 million IOPS for writes, a sequential read bandwidth of up to 7200 MB/s, a sequential write bandwidth of up to 6000 MB/s, an idle power of 3.8 watts, and an active power of 24 watts.

The 400GB P5800X has a slower I/O performance for writes of 1.15 million IOPS, a lower sequential bandwidth of writes of 4800 MB/s, and the same I/O performance and sequential bandwidth for reads. The 2020 drive has a lower active power of 14 watts but the same idle power of 3.8 watts.