Additional information
This press coverage was preceded by a preview at an industry workshop and followed by technical presentations months later.
3D XPoint, the technology behind Intel Optane, is supposed to sit between DRAM and SSD storage. The way it is designed, it might be reserved to the Enterprise and hyperscaler market where it makes more sense today. In terms of performance and durability, it is highly superior to SSDs, which motivates a change in the way disk IO is handled by operating systems and applications. Prices should also sit between DRAM and SSDs.
This technology could also be integrated into SSDs to boost their performance, as was the case for SSHDs which benefitted from the large capacity and durability of magnetic storage with the speed of a Flash cache.