SPEAKING OF OPTANE

Intel’s Optane memory promises one thousand times the switching speed of an SSD, and to get PC nerds even more excited about the new format, Intel showed two images of its nonvolatile memory drives on the eve of CES. We have no idea how much the drives will cost or when they’ll be available, but expect almost unusable small drive capacities of 16- and 32GB. At these sizes, they have little application save as hard drive cache.