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Remember *way* back just before CES 2017, when we caught that? Well, those obviously never happened, and we figured out why a few months later when Intel’s Optane Memory products and realized that the first iteration of these products had no apparent hardware power management capabilities, meaning they would in a mobile platform. While the Optane Memory launch was a year ago, just last month we – what was meant to be the true usable standalone M.2 packaging for Optane. This part was, but with some tweaks to available capacities, and more importantly, support for hardware lower power idle states. While this opened the door for use in laptops, it still did not completely close the loop on an Optane-based caching solution for mobile platforms. That loop gets closed today: Along with a round of other new 8th generation CPU announcements (), Intel has also launched a ‚Core Plus‘ series, which are essentially the same 8th gen Core i3 / i5 / i7 parts, but with the addition of Optane Memory caching. These will be a newer, more power efficient version of the Optane Memory caching parts. While these were previously available in 16GB and 32GB capacities, this new round will add a 64GB tier to the mix. Another update being made to Optane Memory is that instead of caching the OS drive, Optane Memory will be able to cache a secondary data drive. This would be ideal for a system that was already using a fast NVMe SSD or / as the OS drive, where the user also wanted to cache a very large secondary data HDD. The Optane Memory caching is currently limited to caching either the OS drive or a secondary drive – no current possibility to split the higher capacity Optane Memory modules across two separate drives (we asked, and will continue to press this suggestion). Not sure what all of this ‚Optane‘ / ‚3D XPoint‘ stuff is all about? Check out my article detailing how it all works here!
