“Ah… what I could do with a faster PC”. How many times have you heard that one? Well, if that’s you then you might interested that there’s a new form of slot-in cache memory from Intel, “Optane memory”. It promises to give Moore’s Law another push and potentially to make media content production work on PCs faster. If you have a Core i3 CPU or higher…
“powering up your PC will be twice as fast; overall system performance will be faster by up to 28%; storage performance will be up to 14 times better; launching of apps will be up to 5 times faster for Google Chrome, up to 6 times faster for MS Outlook, and up to 67% faster for some games.”
“… officially available from 24th April onwards in 16GB and 32GB sizes at $44.00 and $77.00 respectively.”
Intel-based PCs with Optane memory ready-fitted should be shipping-and-affordable around Christmas 2017. But bear in mind that Intel’s cheapest 8-core consumer CPU costs $1,000 just for the chip. So a complete 8-core + Optane system is not likely to be cheap.
Note, however, that Intel are mostly touting start-up times for software, and I’m guessing that the “overall system performance will be faster by up to 28%” may be degraded by other components. But if you already have the correct motherboard slots and the correct CPU, then a mere $44 for 16GB of Optane memory looks like it may offer a very affordable speed boost for artists, even if it’s only an overall system performance boost of perhaps 15% in the end.
The Optane price also compares well with the current price of around £69 (UK) to get, say, an extra 8Gb of branded DDR3-SDRAM 1600 for my AMD-based PC. But that may may not show a great deal of difference in performance either…
“… for most regular work, there is no tangible performance difference between 8GB and 16GB of system memory.”
For the beast-like 3D software Blender, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation’s…
“test only pushed the entire system usage to 6.1GB”