So what's cooking up in Intel's kitchen? after the spook AMD gave them with the release of Ryzen series, they freaked out and ultimately tried to immediately claw back since the carpet got pulled out of them. With the rushed release of the new Extreme series HEDT Skylake X CPUs like the i9 series starting from 7800X(6Core/12Thread), 7820X(8C/16T), 7900X(10C/20T). With flagship 18C/36T CPU releasing this fall. Many reviewers are also calling this a bad release due to major issues addressed regarding thermals, power draw and optimization.
Intel's other freaky invention is a memory chip on M.2 that functions as cache for hard drives in order to function software running as fast and as sleek as your normal SSD would, while they're installed in your HDD. But not so much in function cause first off you have to repeatedly do the same task twice or more in order for the cache to build up. Basically if you start up your computer it will boot slow, but restarting it makes it boot faster....well ah I think Windows 10 did already come up with that scheme I think it was called "Fast startup". Kind of a redundant point in practicality, oh wait it does load applications and games faster right?.....right?
Oh btw, there's a fascinating read about DDRdrives on PCI ports which is related to this as well. Read here
Let me explain how it works, the technology these chips use are called "3D XPoint" or 3D Crosspoint as pronounced. The product is mash up of DRAM and NAND flash properties but with non-volatile memory. Non-volatile means that the data inside the memory will not be erased once power is off like per say you shutting down your PC or power outages that happens instead with regular RAM, which means once after installing the drive and booting up your PC first time, cache would have build up already but you need to safely shut down your PC in order for it to work 100% in capacity once booted again. Then again, there will be circumstances where the flash during boot time will clear up after multiple reboots cause of few errors. Ok am explaining the same thing I did like in previous paragraph but I hope at this point it's more clear. Now another thing you need to know when running large apps or larger folder sized games is that once it surpasses the memory size of the drive (let's say i.e: Optane 32GB model is being used) the cache will have a hard time keeping up cause it'll be encumbered. Yeah that's the startling limitations, how is this so complicated when it's suppose to be easy am I right? let's not forget, this is new technology. It'll be few months or years before the coding is properly done to optimize for best use scenario. At this point, it isn't at that level it should be. To top off the caveats I gave earlier; you have another two reasons to worry about this. 1) Is that it's gonna cost you well above 70 USD for the 32GB and don't bother about getting the 16GB model cause at this point, there's a lot you can do with the former than the latter. 2) You only can run this as specified, on Kaby-Lake CPUs and the recently released Skylake-X sockets, not Skylake consumer CPUs even after their socket received support for M.2 slots earlier.
Well aside my detraction, I think there are few rare instances were it does come handy. Maybe per say I start pairing with a 2TB HDD or larger capacity hard drive where I can do files transfers over a dozen times the speed(here's the demo that shows it). The memory is also more durable than NAND flash, if you weren't aware; NAND flash chips don't really last that long, not all chip vendors attribute dying the same fashion but in most case this is true after 3-4 years of usage.
In the near future, time will tell when it matures in the market but for now this product isn't on everybody's radar. I think they jumped the bandwagon too soon with this, but it's an interesting concept worth exploring without the hassle it does have today when all said and done. But knowing Intel's track record, it might be be a flop too.