It actually is just another type of SSD. It's just a NVMe drive.
It's a little confusing because Intel markets "Optane" as so many different things. "Optane" as marketed to the consumer is a combination of an Optane NVMe drive and motherboard-level support for disk caching. However, if you choose not to use the caching software, it just turns into a SSD.
The only catch is that most optane drives are pretty small. The consumer ones intended for cache are about 16GB. However, you can buy bigger ones up to about 120GB in M.2 format, and PCIe or U.2 based ones up to 1.5 TB aimed at the prosumer market.
AMD actually does really well with these because they have an extra x4 PCIe lanes (16+4 + 4 more for chipset) so you can run a graphics card at x16 speed and still have 4 more CPU-direct lanes for an Optane drive.
Then on servers you have Optane DIMMs which sorta-not-really replace RAM for massive in-memory servers.
Seems like it only works with Intel 7th gen and later.
Although there's a post on the LTT forums[0] exclaiming that Wendell managed to get it working. (although he also got Thunderbolt working before on AMD)
This is what happens when the marketing department gives the same name to two things which may be broadly in a general product category, but are technically very different. Have seen it with many categories of hardware.
That part isn't terrible, even though it is really unwieldy. The big problem is using "Optane Memory" as the branding for the kind that isn't a memory module.
The natural things to call them are "Optane drives" and "Optane memory". Don't criss-cross that!
Intel has basically been doing that for quite a while with the whole "Core i7", "Core i5", etc naming strategy. Where an i7 targeted at laptops might be substantially the same as an i3 targeted at desktops.
absolutely, for any meaningful comparison one has to track down what the code name for the CPU core is on various semiconductor enthusiast websites, and do ones' own research. There's like 10 different generations of core i3/i5/i7 now. I think the old i7 sitting behind me is an Ivy Bridge.
Yep. I have an Optane PCIe 3.0 4x add in card - 280GB drive - in an AMD TRX40 rig.
I don't imagine PCIe 4.0 will make much difference as a single drive can't make use of the extra bandwidth anyway - but I'm curious to see if there are improvements to the 3D XPoint memory. Kinda bummed I literally just bought mine.
