You have to have Kaby lake of at least an i3 and it seems support for the greenlow platform is limited to a C236 chipset and a Kaby lake Xeon E3v6.
The top brass at Intel seem to have issues when it comes to common sense.
http://hexus.net/tech/news/storage/104143-intel-optane-cache-drives-play-budget-kaby-lake-cpus/
The way I see it common sense wasn't involved with the whole idea behind a consumer M.2 cache device either. Particularly one that costs as much as a good SSD .
#!/usr/bin/GOALKEEPERthoughts
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"
Sigh. Here we go with Intel hating on AyyMD again.
"The moral of the story is to just buy more RAM and skip the Optane meme.
No need to worry about it, you don't want to have one regardless.
Only plus I see with such a drive is the higher endurance than SSDs, but then again large double level cell based SSDs literally never wear out in consumer level usage.
I'd honestly expect first gen optane SSDs to max out pci-e 3.0 X4 with ease, but it seems i was wrong.
Those SSDs have really bad performance numbers in everything but latency.
I also don't see any technical reason as to why it's only for certain chips/chipsets, isn't it just a NVME drive?
I am looking forward to picking up a couple 32gb optane to use as a ZIL with my ancient spinning rust zfs pools. Dat write speed will be amazeballs.
Or whatever the appropriate lingo is these days.
That's great if you have the money but will still be very expensive for a lot of systems. Adding more memory is not too much of problem for a dual CPU setup with 16 memory slots, but for someone with a C200 board that's limited to 4 RAM slots Optane offered a lot of promise.
32Gb is only $77.
This is the optane cache, not the SSD, but yeah I would like to know why Skylake CPU's and C232 aren't supported.
Intel seem to be purposefully tying up a lot of it's hardware. Eg the dropping of ECC support from the Pentium.
"Dat write speed will be totes amazeballs"
Slight amendment 
LOLZ is the only response possible to that
Intel is marketing Optane as a hybrid between nand and dram, though these newest products are essentially SSDs with good latency.
You can also use normal SSDs for the same type of caching as they're using the optane cache drive for here, though how it runs under the hood and performance aren't alike.
Would be cool if they could make a video comparing a high speed NVME SSD (960pro/SM961/intel750) to a HDD / HDDcached with optane, and a HDD cached with a SSD.
These still are going to make sense for bestbuy pre-builts with an I3, I5, or I7 and like a 1 or 2TB Hard drive. OEM's like dell, hp, or asus aren't going to pay retail price for these and they're going to include them in systems targeted at un-informed bestbuy customers, and Optane caching will legitimately make those prebuilts feel much snappier without an OEM having to spend out for a full-fat 120GB+ SSD. If for say one of my uncles walked into a bestbuy and looked around, there's a good chance they'd buy the unit with a well marketed intel i-series sticker and maybe an Optane sticker beside it.
These can certainly have some use in scenarios like Wendell mentioned, but the otherwise the slow moving home compute OEM's have really "understood" the value of a system SSD over the last six months. Customers have noticed too and most seem happy to tote an external harddrive or a basic NAS for storage outside their laptop 120-250 GD system drive. If they even fill that up.
Primarily I think that the Optane team were in need of a product. Something that fit with what the technology was presently capable of.
o_O I thought you had like 200GB RAM in there? Isn't that used first?
Reads yes not writes. Writes are only cached for 5 seconds
Oh ...... uh, ......... well, shit. Now I have to think about that too.....
