what is intel optane and how does it work?

[BulldogBuzz]

I would be grateful to anyone who would care to express there knowledge about intel optane memory and how does it work.
Just a few questions
1 What is it
2 How does it work
3 How is it different from Ram
4 Will it make a computer faster
5 In your opinion is it worth the extra cost

Thanks to all who answer

 

[beers]

@Intel_man where you at.

You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint

For general usage, not really worth the cost over just buying a normal larger nvme drive.

 

[Intel_man]

Uh... I'll reply to the questions in the eyes of your average consumer and NOT an enterprise user.

1. It's a type of non-volatile memory that is usually sold in a form of a SSD or Cache accelerator depending on the product you're looking at that they offer. Optane memory refers to the memory chip it uses. It's like a competitor to NAND flash and somewhat DRAM at the enterprise level. On a tl:dr level, optane offers super low latency compared to NAND flash, but it is not as fast as DRAM.
2. Works just like any SSD does.
3. It's not ram. Well it can be. But not the consumer products. At the consumer level, it's either a SSD which would operate like any other SSD's out there but faster in very specific workloads or a Cache accelerator that makes your slower mechanical HDD's faster.
4. It could if you can utilize the very specific advantages Optane offers. In most use cases, probably not.
5. Not really.

 

[BulldogBuzz]

Thank you for your time and knowledge

 

[beers]

I'll reply to the questions in the eyes of your average consumer and NOT an enterprise user.

What's the fun in that, the enterprise side gets all of the shiny stuff