It looks to be an accelerator cache for HDDs, but slower than an SSD, with fairly low capacity. And it requires a 7th gen intel processor, so this isn't a performance boost for older PCs either. Exactly who is this aimed at?
You lose SSD transfer speed, while gain _some_ hardware response latency.
NVMe response latency (on hardware side, not OS) is around 14-15micro-seconds on reads, and tops out at 200micro-seconds on writes [1]. Which is nearly 2-3 orders of magnitude below spinning rust. While Optane can halve this to 7micro-seconds on reads. The price/pref vs established NVMe tech is non-existent.
When I can spend $X/GB to get a 2000% performance bump, its hard to justify spending $X*4/GB to get 2050% performance bump. Most applications/data centers have yet to transfer to NVMe. Offering marginal gains a sizable markup is a risky strategy.
Furthermore Optane is nearly 2 orders of magnitude lower than RAM in latency, and 5 orders of magnitude lower transfer. So the idea of "non-volatile RAM" has yet to arrive.
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Also "Transparent to the OS" should strike fear in your heart. The OS's job is to manage hardware, memory, and caches. Why drop this?
Too small to provide much of an cache, when you can have 256GB of SSD for the same price.
It is a pity that the marketing docs don't address how this impacts on write consistency. Instant write sync is the primary advantage of hardware RAID, but still, how much better is this than a normal SSD?
These first generation products don't actually have better endurance, though.
90us of raw device latency, then software overhead of 22-25us (2-3us driver, 6-7us kernel, 14-15us user space).
So, the 6us access latency quoted in the Anandtech article would be significantly faster than NVMe SSD.
"Q4: Will Intel Optane memory also accelerate an SSD? If so how much?
A: Yes. Intel Optane memory can be used to accelerate any type of SATA-based storage media, including SATA SSDs, However, the performance benefit of adding Intel Optane memory will be greater on slower storage devices like an HDD versus a relatively faster storage device like a SATA-SSD. Additional performance data is forthcoming"
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tech...
Intel's Windows-only caching software for the Optane Memory product will refuse to work on any but the newest Intel platforms, but any other caching software will work fine on any platform that supports PCIe. If it turns out that small Optane caches are worth what Intel's charging for the hardware, then the existing third-party caching solutions will get tuned to make full use of Optane.
2. In the NVMe form factor, it supports older CPUs.
3. In the DIMM form factor, it will be far, far faster than NVMe, but intel isn't saying when those are coming.
The idea is M.2 speed > SATA, but the dynamic M.2 caching isn't native to the OS, so drivers are required to intermediate.
Pretty underwhelming relative to the hype.
But yes, nicer M.2s will perform better!
Maybe this makes sense if you need lots of space. Over 1TB SSDs are expensive.