what it is, what it is for and how it works on PC

Truth be told, the initial premise of Intel Optane technology came to naught. Initially, the tech giant placed a lot of emphasis on the benefits it could bring, especially for low-end PCs, but the evolution of the market made its existence insignificant and for Intel, Optane is become a secondary brand of other products. , also secondary. Let’s see this in detail.

What is Intel Optane and how does it work?

Physically, Intel Optane was on SSD in M.2 format very low capacity which served as hidden of the system. Typically, dedicated cache is typically used in high performance, high demand systems where thousands of concurrent operations occur every second, and where there is no longer a need for fast, non-volatile storage to be able to use the calculations already carried out by the processor without having to recalculate them.

One of the things to consider when it comes to the cache is how often the computer needs to access it. In reality, a home PC will rarely need to access this type of memory because with the capacity and speed of current RAM, it has more than enough even when it comes to demanding tasks.

The point is that in terms of performance, the idea of ​​Optane is to significantly reduce the access time

the system storage unit, that is, the hard drive. The arrival of Optane came with the heyday of SSDs, which were found to deliver performance by many integers above traditional mechanical hard drives, allowing the most used data to be stored in the memory of Optane to have a faster access for them.

What happened to this technology today?

The result was that with a mechanical hard drive, it w as possible to significantly increase performance, not to the level of an SSD but expensive. But even with a SATA 3 interface SSD, it already performs better than Intel Optane, and since M.2 SSDs and with a PCI-Express interface didn’t take long to arrive, the reality is that Intel Optane was doomed to failure. .

As of mid-2021, Intel is still releasing Intel Optane memory in two variants: H10 with SSD storage and M10, but as we even told you, Intel itself makes it clear in the case of M10 memory designed to work with it. mechanical hard disks with SATA interface, precisely because it is in this case that an improvement in performance is noticeable.

And here is the crux of the matter, who uses a SATA mechanical hard drive as a system drive today? Hardly anyone, and those who probably do not have an Intel Optane compatible motherboard, because you need the motherboard to be tech-enabled for it to work.

In short, and answering the title question, Intel Optane technology was a pretty good and promising approach to creating a dedicated cache on any PC in a way that speeds up data access time when running. using a slow hard drive, but with the rise of SSDs and their limited access times, this technology has ceased to make sense and you could almost say it died before it fully hit the market.