Intel Optane cache drives don't play with budget Kaby Lake CPUs

[HEXUS]

7th gen Intel Pentium and Celeron chips cannot make use of Optane technology.

Read more.

[Biscuit]

Yayyyy more ground breaking technology that segments the market.

[EvilCycle]

It's not great, but in reality how many people with a CPU in a lower tier than an i3 (or even an i5 in most cases) are really going to be considering one of these?

[DanceswithUnix]

It's not great, but in reality how many people with a CPU in a lower tier than an i3 (or even an i5 in most cases) are really going to be considering one of these?

Possibly quite a few. If you can afford a top end CPU you probably have a 1TB SSD and little use for any piffling cache technology. If you are on a budget, you are more likely to have spinning rust that will benefit from a cache SSD, and if a spending a bit more gets you a better cache SSD perhaps you will stump up for it?

Can only guess, I think Optane is a waste of money, I'm clearly not the target market.

[Dashers]

Agreed, cache drives are for people on low-end systems who want a bit of oomph. High end systems already have NVMe drives. I'm interested in seeing 500gig Optane drives.

[The Khemist]

I bent my Wookiee! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySJF9D2PdZc

[aidanjt]

What is it with companies and artificial CPU limitations these days?

[qasdfdsaq]

It's not great, but in reality how many people with a CPU in a lower tier than an i3 (or even an i5 in most cases) are really going to be considering one of these?

You're missing the point, that being who else is really going to be considering one of these? Gamers on i5/i7s? Unlikely someone spending $200+ on a graphics card will be so desperate to save $10 to get a 32GB cache SSD instead of paying $10 more for a 250GB full SSD...

[qasdfdsaq]

What is it with companies and artificial CPU limitations these days?

Companies? It's just Intel. Hopefully the competition not doing it will push them to change their practices. Remember all these products were in the pipeline years before they knew what Ryzen was bringing to the table.

[fail_quail]

It's a weird technology for sure in it's current incarnation.

An odd mix of locking out those who'd most benefit from it* in favour of the high end that really don't have much need of it...

It'd make more sense if you could set it to cache non-boot mechanical HDDs in a high-end system, but from what i've read it's only the OS boot drive. Caching a SSD will give less benefit and who has a HDD as a primary drive in a high-end PC?

*Your average PCworld jobby would make great use of it. You'd undoubtedly not get it in the shop build due to razor-thin margins, but having it as a cheap easy upgrade down the line would do wonders for such a system...

[DevDrake]

Funny.
I am excited with the optane technology but seruisly it is not what i would buy as for now.
1. I canot see the realtime difference between SSD and NVMe (which is 2 to 4 times faster)
2. I see no reason for gamers to have SSD for games - i had that but i realised that having my steam library on HDD and os on SSD almost the same - no kidding. HOTS game is loading 15 sec instead of 12 sec.in both cases i usually wait for other players. It is similar for other games, and there is no difference in the runtime of the game.
3. optane as a catch that cost of SSD suitable for OS...
4. If you need awsome speed then do ram cache, no processor restrictions there.

[aniilv]

2. I see no reason for gamers to have SSD for games - i had that but i realised that having my steam library on HDD and os on SSD almost the same - no kidding. HOTS game is loading 15 sec instead of 12 sec.in both cases i usually wait for other players. It is similar for other games, and there is no difference in the runtime of the game.

depends what games

BF1 takes a good minute to load a map on hdd, while ssd its maybe 20 seconds... That's enough for few of us to convert. And then there are games like guild wars 2, which on hard drive can load something like 2 min on some locations on first load, while on ssd it literally is 20 or less seconds. And you do feel that difference.

Nothing to do with optane technology, just nitpicking ;]

[aidanjt]

Companies? It's just Intel.

This isn't the only example of companies doing stupid crap like this.

[Corky34]

1. I canot see the realtime difference between SSD and NVMe (which is 2 to 4 times faster)

The main difference seems to be the higher iOPS at low queue depths, that in itself is worth having but Intel seems to be doing an really bad job packaging it into a product and marketing it.

[DanceswithUnix]

The main difference seems to be the higher iOPS at low queue depths, that in itself is worth having but Intel seems to be doing an really bad job packaging it into a product and marketing it.

Higher IOPS will give you lower queue depths as the storage can keep up better, so really what it is giving you is higher IOPS.

His point is, while the change from rotating media to SSD is a noticeable step change in enough use cases that people can feel an improvement in the machine, the difference between the cheapest SATA SSD and the fastest NVMe drive is measurable but you can't feel any difference. Getting an even more expensive SSD using this Optane technology seems, for home users, completely pointless.

In server usage, you would be writing to perhaps 100 SSDs in parallel to get enough capacity, so you already have insane aggregate throughput.

Optane is a nice technology, but it needs to displace flash by being price competitive and Intel doesn't do cheap products. I suspect it will pop up in odd products like this for some time as Intel tries to find a way to fleece it with us, before finally mandating that all Gen 9 or whenever CPUs that they make must have the BIOS stored on Optane for some made up performance reason but actually just to shift some stock.

In this case, if you have to upgrade your Pentium to an i5 in order to buy an Optane cache, then they win again with another CPU sale so they probably won't see the problem.

[Corky34]

Higher IOPS will give you lower queue depths as the storage can keep up better, so really what it is giving you is higher IOPS.

Only that's not what we see with Optane as it has around the same iOPS as SSD's and NVMe drives, however most SSD's and NVMe drives don't reach their maximum iOPS until they hit maximum QD whereas Optane reaches it's maximum iOPS at much lower QD, they say pictures tell a thousand words so..

His point is, while the change from rotating media to SSD is a noticeable step change in enough use cases that people can feel an improvement in the machine, the difference between the cheapest SATA SSD and the fastest NVMe drive is measurable but you can't feel any difference. Getting an even more expensive SSD using this Optane technology seems, for home users, completely pointless.

I would disagree, the change most people feel when changing from HDD to SSD is mainly down to the increase in iOPS from the 100-200 of HDD to the 10-20k of an SSD, and no I'm not mistaking my numbers as an SSD or NVMe drives rarely hit their maximum iOPS of 100-200k.

In server usage, you would be writing to perhaps 100 SSDs in parallel to get enough capacity, so you already have insane aggregate throughput.

It's not about throughput, it's about accessing lots of small amounts of data really quickly.