The legal risks were at most the last straw. If Optane had a promising future, Intel could have made the investments necessary to make the legal issues go away. If Optane had a promising future, Micron would have helped Intel secure that future. The long-term value of a persistent memory technology capable of taking a big chunk out of both the DRAM and NAND flash markets is huge.

Optane did not have a promising future. The $/GB gap between 3D XPoint memory and 3D NAND flash memory was only going to keep growing. Optane was doomed to only be appealing to the niche of workloads where flash memory is too slow and DRAM is too expensive. But even DRAM was increasing in density faster than 3D XPoint, and flash (especially the latency-optimized variants that are still cheaper than 3D XPoint) is fast enough for a lot of workloads. Optane needed a breakthrough improvement to secure a permanent place in the memory hierarchy, and Intel couldn't come up with one.