"Optane" is probably the worst branding name I have ever heard. That is dangerously close to OCZ Technology's old "Octane" which are some of the worst SSDs ever produced. I checked to see if Optane was a legitimate word that I didn't know and nothing appears at dictionary or merriam. If they want to just make up ridiculous names it might as well be Erftaburf Series SSDs.

Wrong. bta, you might want to add the above two points to your summary.As is the case with all new tech. But as consumer adoption increases costs will decrease, and there will always be high-end prosumers who can afford the best, so the price of NAND should drop soon after XPoint launches.

Soon we will get HPTX motherboards with one CPU socket and about 80 DIMM slots to fill with SSD-DIMMs. ;)



Seriously tho. It looks extremely promising, but doubt very much that it will hit the consumer market any time soon. It will require extensive time in the enterprise segment before it is downgraded to "PC enthusiast/consumer" grade. At this moment in time NVMe is more than enough for most of extreme jobs you can think of. There simply not enough processing power inside CPU itself on one side and software on the other to require more.



To fully utilize benefits of NVMe or X-Point we need more lanes for starters and radically redesigned motherboards with more bandwidth than you can imagine today. Take just ordinary "slow" 750. Inside that monster sits 18 channel controller. Which means if you put enough dies on PCB x16 Gen. 3 PCI-Ex slot will be hopelessly insufficient for the task in hand. PCI Express Gen. 15 anyone?



It's funny that 15 years ago everything was totally bottlenecked by slow spinning HDDs. Today situation is totally reversed. HDDs are disappearing (slowly but surely) into oblivion and current scheme how PC is working quickly turning to be obsolete - storage is bottlenecked by everything else..



Irony of fate my friends...