Benchlife.info claims Chipzilla will roll out its Optane Memory 8000p series devices in 16GB and 32GB capacities. Optane is an NAND flash alternative which acts as a half-way house between system memory and storage.

The higher capacity model has additional performance. Read performance is five to 10 percent  faster on the larger model, and write performance of the 32GB model is about 70 percent faster than the smaller. Benchlife says that these initial consumer Optane products will communicate over two lanes of PCIe 3.0 and will come in M.2 2241 and 2280 physical packages.

Optane needs Kaby Lake or newer Intel CPUs and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, 8.1, and 10.

Optane is Chipzilla's joint venture with Micron for the production of 3D XPoint non-volatile memory technology. The companies claim 3D XPoint will offer a generational leap of non-volatile memory that is denser than DRAM. Compared to NAND flash, 3D XPoint is said to offer substantially higher write endurance and performance potential.