Intel Sneaks Out Core+ Processors With Bundled Optane Drives

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Barty1884

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So the "bundle" offers no benefit in pricing vs buying them individually? :lol:

I still don't understand why Optane even exists.
Small, cache drive would benefit older systems.... but you have to be on KL (?) or newer for support?
The vast majority of people building on a new platform are using full-blown SSDs.. no?
 


Its also amusing that Optane isnt supported on the 310 chipset either
 

Barty1884

Retired Moderator
Seriously? Haven't read much into the new chipsets yet.

That's ridiculous. To me, that's exactly who something like Optane is aimed at? Very tight budgets, with no room for luxuries like an SSD.

*sigh*
 

hons

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BARTY1884 17 minutes ago
So the "bundle" offers no benefit in pricing vs buying them individually? :lol:

I still don't understand why Optane even exists.
Small, cache drive would benefit older systems.... but you have to be on KL (?) or newer for support?
The vast majority of people building on a new platform are using full-blown SSDs.. no?

For the same price you got a extra "+". :)
Free from Intel!!!!!
 

Giroro

Splendid
Optane exists so you can turn your 3TB+ HDD into a SSHD that actually works as advertised.

But since there is no discount, skip the bundle and get the 32GB optane instead; it performs better. Actually everybody who is interested in optane is probably already wants the 32GB version, which would explain why intel is looking for creative ways to clear out the 16GB cards before they announce the next generation.
 

Barty1884

Retired Moderator


I understand why it's *marketed* to exist, but not actually "why".

The minimum support (KL i3, B250, DDR4 etc) is a bare minimum $250 before you can even have the 'privilege' of Optane :lol: As an upgrade to older systems, for a relatively cheap outlay (perhaps paired with a PCIe addon card), it would make some form of sense...... in it's current state, I just don't see how.

An actual SSD, 250GB range, albeit SATA3 and on the budget end... can frequently be found for $60-$70.
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/M3RzK8/adata-ultimate-su650-240gb-25-solid-state-drive-asu650ss-240gt-c

The same (general) ballpark as Intel's over-hyped cache drive's MSRP at $77 :lol:
 

stdragon

Admirable


Agreed....right up to the point where Intel just announced with the new RST driver, you will be able to use Optane with an HDD other than your primary boot device.

While other applications could benefit, for gamers at least, this means having a 3+TB SSHD drive used to hold your Steam library to improve loading times for the games most often played. That's huge, because buying anything larger than a 256GB M.2 NVMe drive is a waste of money if you can add a secondary HDD and Optane unit later. And remember, Optane doesn't offer much in terms performance over NVMe drives with the exception of random IOPS; Optane stomps the competition in that one metric!
 

Technically, someone on a "very tight budget" could get a 120-128GB SSD for the same price as a 16GB Optane cache. There are multiple SSDs in that capacity range available for less than $40. And that should be plenty of space to store one's OS and applications, while most large bulk data files such as video typically won't really benefit from being stored on an SSD or cached with Optane anyway, and should be fine on a hard drive without it. Or, for just $20 more, you can double that SSD capacity to 240GB, enough to also store some modern games that are actively being played. So, I don't actually think it's a particularly good fit for budget systems.

For a more mid-range gaming system, again, there are SSDs available, including some 480-512GB models in the $110-$120 range, which should hold a decent number of games. Maybe someone could see some occasional benefit from adding an Optane cache to a hard drive containing lesser-played titles in their extended Steam library, but how much is a 16GB cache really going to help load times when divided across a large collection of infrequently played games? Relatively few of any game's data files will ever get cached, and any game that you play regularly enough to get its data cached should probably be moved over to an SSD for more predictable performance.
 
I suspect that Optane is the first, expensive, hard-to-use iteration of a useful new technology. Many of us remember when the first SSDs were about the same capacity, usable only as cache, required special motherboards and software for support.... Sound familiar?
 

USAFRet

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Exactly.
This is still way too early, no matter how they include it.

Possibly this is a large L4 cache in the near future.
 

stdragon

Admirable
L4 cache? Try L3. Intel is developing Optane DIMM RAM. It would seem that they're trying to bring back the paradigm where RAM and Storage is one in the same; a sliding scale of how it's be either used or allocated. It's almost like going back to the days of "core" memory, but using silicon instead of ferrite rings. However, L1 and L2 still remain on the CPU for obvious reasons.

I'm thinking Intel is trying to push this more towards the mobile market than the desktop, which BTW makes a lot of sense to do so for a variety of technical reasons.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator


We already have 1, 2, & 3.
This might be another layer on top of that.

Just spitballing here.
 

bigdragon

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Optane appears to be all about vendor lock-in. I don't see the advantage of Optane over a fast NVME SSD in home user or prosumer environments. Ok, so Optane lets people render 3D Disney Animation movies faster. Does it get me more FPS in a game or speed up Blender normal mapping? Not enough to justify the price and lock-in! The value-added is not worth the negatives.
 

USAFRet

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Exactly.
And we see people here trying to marry an Optane with a Z68 motherboard, because "New! Shiny! Fast!"
 

DavidC1

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This might be ok if the 16GB bundle is the new, Optane M10. If its not, then you are better off buying the 16GB yourself.

A computer store near me has the original 16GB being sold for 29.99 CDN. That's ~$25 for you American folks. They were selling the 32GB for $50 CDN($40 US) for a while, same as the bundle pricing add-on for the 16GB.
 

epobirs

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I have a system I built with a 256GB NVMe SSD and a 32GB Optane M.2 stick before I learned that there was no support for use with secondary storage. If this has now changed I'll have to pull that system out and see if I can get the caching going with the 3TB hard drive. It's been packed away unused because video cards were outrageously priced and I hoped it would return to normal sooner than later. Later has come and gone. Perhaps it's time to demote my main desktop with IGA. That's an older i5 with a 120GB Sata SSD, so the KL i7 and fast storage would be an upgrade. It just wouldn't be the replacement for my gaming system as intended.
 

manleysteele

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The problem I have with these "drives" is that they require 2 PCIe lanes. That's 2 too many for what you get in return. If Intel wants me to take optane seriously, they'll quit fooling around and launch the consumer SKU's of optane dram modules. I have 8 SSD's in my system now. I'm already using all the available PCIe slots on my system. I had to buy a controller card to get 8 more SAS ports. I'm not going to change the way I build storage sub-systems. I don't understand why Intel is so chintzy about PCIe ports. I know it takes the pin count up on CPU or chipset to add PCIe ports, but they're already changing sockets every time they pass gas, so what's the big deal? Just put them in the chipset, which is soldered to the motherboard and quit low-balling PCIe on the expensive chipsets like Z-series and X-series.
 

manleysteele

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While you're at it, Intel, quit dragging your fat feet on PCIe 4.0. Just introduce it and all of us poor, dumb users and system builders will make the adjustment somehow.
 

Karadjgne

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Intel moved the memory controller off the motherboard for a reason. Adding Optane back to the mobo is just more circuitry that can go wrong. How many times have we all answered posts about ram that's funked or bad or incompatible. And now Intel is sticking a drive onto the mobo? What happens to that 3Tb HDD when the Optane takes a hit. What happens to the mobo when it does.
I can see this having a purpose in lower grade laptops running hdds, but the modularity of a modern pc and the ability to replace or upgrade parts is half the reason to own a pc over a console or laptop in the first place.
 

Big_D_Design

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New RST drivers are a game changer for Optane. I would choose the 32GB Optane and link it up to a Hard Drive for multiple uses. I have a Win7 system with RST that has been reliable. When working on projects too.... it will cache that folder when working on something for days. I couldn't understand why initially the Optane could be used for Boot Drives only. To open up Optane for storage drives is what should be been incorporated from the beginning.
 

stdragon

Admirable
“What happens to that 3Tb HDD when the Optane takes a hit. What happens to the mobo when it does.”

According to Intel, they’re bound together and the loss of the Optane module requires a 3rd party solution for HDD data recovery.

I initially thought Optane was nothing more that a caching feature where the HDD would regress back to normal operation in the event of an Optane hardware failure; guess not. Perhaps this is just a blanket statement as failure of Optane in the middle of a cached write-back operation would corrupt the file system.
 
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