Probably just marketing hype.

Some numbers:

Modern DDR4 RAM quad channel: 50,000MB/s

Optane SSD: 2,000MB/s

Also nothing on the PCIe bus is going to have a latency of RAM to the OS, unless mapped as RAM.

The initial marketing blitz was all about the performance of the memory itself. Putting it in a NVMe SSD hanging off the PCIe bus instead of directly on the CPU's memory controller takes away most of the performance benefit. Intel's hit their goals for density, and missed their goals for endurance.

Using memtest86 on dual core Opterons got a measurement of about 2200 Mbytes/second, I think, with DDR1 PC3200 ECC RAM.

I think you could get a lot of work done with a 750GB RAM (2 of these, or one coming later) and dualcore Opteron setup.

DDR1 PC3200 single channel should give you 25.6 GB/s in theory.

Isn't the PC component an upper limit on performance of a DIMM? PC3200 means 3200MB/s. While a single DDR3 1600 PC12800 DIMM would max at a theoretical 12.8GB/s.

Expand the tables here: http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/support-memory-speeds-compatab...

Err I made a mistake, you are right. PCx means a limit of "x" per channel. My brain read PC3200 as "DDR-3200" ie. 3200 MT/s.

High-end server CPUs such as Intel Broadwell support quad-channel DDR4-2400 PC19200 which is 76.8 GB/s, a lot more bandwidth than the Octane.

Well the Ars article says they're still promising 1000x lower latency so that seems pretty misleading. And that 3x endurance is vs. MLC flash; it still handily loses to SLC.

The SemiAccurate article looks very fair to me.

If you read the details of the article, there's some pretty open questions about whether Xpoint is 3x the endurance of NAND, or even higher duration than NAND.

And the latency improvement seems to be 2x, not the 10x you claim, or the 1000x Intel originally claimed. (Intel's own numbers compare 20ms for flash versus 10ms for XPoint...) Which isn't nothing, to be sure, but...