Intel Corp (INTC)

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In terms of speeding up all PCs with large HDD and making them perform like a SSD. And for this, you need "7th Generation Core ix and Optane Ready Motherboards". Is this a useful weapon against Ryzen? Does this change your opinion, TCE?

I'm aware of the Optane Cache

I think it's a cool platform feature and the PC OEMs will like that they can advertise big HDD capacity + Optane cache for a reasonable price, especially to gamers (games are pretty huge so it can be prohibitively expensive to buy enough SSDs for all of your games).

It'll be interesting to see if it works as advertised; Intel had a similar technology back in the day where you could use a NAND SSD cache + HDD to get what was advertised as "most" of an SSDs performance.

Performance keeps going up. The maximized SRT system is now virtually indistinguishable from the standalone SSD system.

Gaming is actually a pretty big reason to consider using Intel SRT since games can eat up a lot of storage space. Personally I keep one or two frequently used titles on my SSD, everything else goes on the HDD array. As the numbers above show however, there's a definite performance benefit to deploying a SSD cache in a gaming environment.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching-review/4

This time, instead of taking slow + fast and hoping that it averages out closer to "fast" than to "slow," Intel is taking slow (HDD) + ultra fast (Optane) and claiming it averages out to fast (SSD-like).

We'll see how it works out and if the gaming PC OEMs find it valuable or just a gimmick. When Optane cache comes out, keep an eye on the major gaming PC builders and see how broadly they deploy Optane.