What is Intel Optane?

My boredom meter pegged out at 2:35.

What IS Intel Optane, with out all the hype?

..."3D XPoint (pronounced "crosspoint," not "ex-point") is a promising form of non-volatile memory jointly developed by Intel and Micron. Intel claims that the memory, which it's branding Optane for commercial products, provides a compelling mix of properties putting it somewhere between DRAM and NAND flash.

The first Optane products are almost here. For certain enterprise workloads, there's the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X, a 375GB PCIe card that offers substantially lower latency than comparable flash drives and can boast high numbers of I/O operations per second (IOPS) over a much wider range of workloads than flash. Intel isn't letting reviewers actually use the P4800X, however; the first testing of the hardware, published earlier this week, was performed remotely using hardware on Intel's premises."...

Well it's a new technology that no one seems to know exactly how it works, except of course the developers at Intel/Micron...It seems to bridge the gap between hard drive non-volatile, flash memory which fails under constant write/rewrite, and volatile RAM memory...It has to do with speed of operation, but only helps in certain instances just now, but the future development promises a much faster operation.....So it's like a hard drive storage and flash in that it doesn't erase the information on reboot like the faster RAM does....So you could call it RAM speed hard drive memory that lasts longer than the flash drives do...but still in the development stage....

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/04/intel-optane-memory-how-to-make-revolutionary-technology-totally-boring/

"Well it's a new technology that no one seems to know exactly how it works"

They should have called it "Autopilot". Nobody knows how that works either, except the developers.

Is it always sunny in Phoenix?

If they called it auto-pilot, then your computer would not just crash, it would crash into things. We just can't have that, now can we?

The product appears to be containing some form(s) of chalcogenide glass, but it remains unclear of the form of the liquid/solid, (not sure if crystal or amorphous, or truly glass state).

Until cost optimization is complete, and capacity optimization reaches suitable levels, this product remains in niche applications (cache memory with recent Intel processors, and server farms).

Speed of these devices, along with non-volatility, and durability of the medium represents the key advances, compared to non-volatile memory devices.

Thanks! GA. That, in the end, is reassuring.

And could someone basically translate what he said into common parlance?

I think so: For the ordinary user, who replaces their computer every 5-10 years, the SSD is likely to last as long as the computer. If your SSD gets close to 90% full, it's time to get a larger one.

HDDs are hardly perfect. I've replaced failing or failed ones for several people in recent months, nearly always with an SSD.

I've had SSDs for 5 years now, with no problem except limited capacity. I did replace the original 250G SSD with a 500G SSD in my 2012 MacBook Pro.

I'll wait a couple of generations and try it out when it plugs into a USB port.