[News] Intel Pushes Motherboard + Optane Bundles, "Coffee Lake" in August

https://www.techpowerup.com/233450/i...lake-in-august

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Back in April, we reported motherboard manufacturer MSI bundling Intel's Optane cache SSD with a few of its mid-range motherboards. While not free, the bundle would be slightly cheaper than the sum of its parts (buying the board and SSD separately). At the time we predicted that other motherboard vendors could launch similar bundles. It turns out that Intel is indeed coordinating motherboard + Optane SSD bundles.

In a bid to boost sales of its 200-series chipset motherboards and Core "Kaby Lake" processors, Intel is coordinating bundles of motherboards across brands with its Optane cache SSDs. Analysts predict that this could be an inventory-clearing exercise by Intel, because it plans to launch its next-generation Core "Coffee Lake" processors by late-August, 2017. "Coffee Lake" will see the introduction of six-core processor SKUs to Intel's mainstream-desktop platform, which is currently led by the quad-core i7-7700K "Kaby Lake."

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https://www.techpowerup.com/img/17-0...3cc81bc20f.jpg

I struggle to see the value of Optane at the moment. I realise that its a good value way to get 'sort of' SSD performance, but the price at the moment that i see in stores, you can get a much higher capacity SSD regardless.

I must be missing something!

Especially seeing as this is only available on the latest hardware. I'd have thought this would have been more useful for people with ageing systems to breathe in new life for those with budgets and hard drives?

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Originally Posted by SADS

I struggle to see the value of Optane at the moment. I realise that its a good value way to get 'sort of' SSD performance, but the price at the moment that i see in stores, you can get a much higher capacity SSD regardless.

I must be missing something!

Especially seeing as this is only available on the latest hardware. I'd have thought this would have been more useful for people with ageing systems to breathe in new life for those with budgets and hard drives?

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Even Intel struggles to see the value on Optane. That's why it has to come bundled with a board...

The only value of consumer-level Optane at the moment appears to be lower latency for small file reads/writes.

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Originally Posted by SADS

I struggle to see the value of Optane at the moment. I realise that its a good value way to get 'sort of' SSD performance, but the price at the moment that i see in stores, you can get a much higher capacity SSD regardless.

I must be missing something!

Especially seeing as this is only available on the latest hardware. I'd have thought this would have been more useful for people with ageing systems to breathe in new life for those with budgets and hard drives?

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it is supposed to be a real help for bulk storage raid arrays with shingled drives, but intel does not support it for a raid cache yet. as a cache for things with things like unraid you can use it to do the raid pre-caching on any platform with nvme support.

i dont get it with the current consumer use other than getting around two drives and junctions if some one wants a cheap ssd and cheap bulk but not 2 visible drives.