Intel announces a first Optane product for the consumer market-- cache drive modules designed to reduce loading times through extremely low latency and SSD speeds.
The modules offer limited capacity of only 16 or 32GB, but with latency of under 10 microseconds and peak sequential read speeds reaching 900MB/s Intel claims a performance boost of 28%. The company says storage loads up to 14x faster, while common apps such as Chrome or Outlook load up to 5-6x faster and games can load levels up to 65% faster.
Customers interested in the Optane modules have to keep in mind the requirement of a PC running on a 7th-generation Core (such as Kaby Lake) chipset. Interestingly, AanandTech notes the performance boost is not really felt if one has an SSD as primary storage, meaning the modules are best used in PCs stuck with traditional HDDs.
Chipzilla says the Optane desktop modules ship from April 2017, before Optane-equipped PCs from Asus, Dell, HP and Lenovo hit the market throughout Q2 2017.
Go What Happens When Your PC Meets Intel Optane Memory
Go Intel Launches Optane Memory M.2 Cache SSDs for Consumer Market (AanandTech)
