No Optane Support for Intel Kaby Lake Pentium and Celeron

Low-Cost Intel H270, Q250 and B250 motherboard Chipsets have Optane Support

Intel rolled out its Optane Memory technology update which is now provided via motherboard manufacturers. It meant to provide optimized speed for low budget-friendly systems. Ironically, it would seem odd that a function is supported in low-cost Intel 200 chipsets and yet did not provide support for low-cost processors in Kaby Lake Celeron and Pentium lineup.

Apart from that, any of the i3, i5 and i7 Kaby Lake will have its support, starting from Core i3-7100. Low Power Kaby Lake’T’ suffix processors also have Intel Optane memory technology support.

In India, you get the Pentium G4560 dual-core kaby lake but not Intel Pentium G4620. For comparison, Intel Pentium’s highest SKU 4620 costS $109 while the base i3 Kaby Lake 7100 costs $119. Both are dual core processors with Pentium 4620 clocked at 3.7 GHz released this year and i3-7100 clocked at 3.9 GHz which was released in 2016. While doing a side-by-side comparison the difference in its paper specification has an insignificant difference. Yet Intel doesn’t provide this feature support for Kaby Lake Pentium.

Intel Optane memory works by using its 3D XPoint technology for caching. An Optane drive is installed in a compatible motherboard for advanced caching. For now, 16GB and 32GB Intel Optane drives are available. Unlike NAND-base caching solution, this looks to be very promising.

While the supporting argument would point towards market segmentation, it seems Intel is having a tough time to justify the differences between its SKUs even within its architecture.

No Optane Support for Intel Kaby Lake Pentium and Celeron from hardware

No #Optane Support for @Intel #KabyLake #Pentium and #Celeron https://t.co/kryeGezQcm via @hardwarebbq #pcmr #diypc #technews #news #pctech

— Hardware BBQ (@HardwareBBQ) March 31, 2017

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