Did the people have a choice when picking the words used in the advertising? Would other words make it clear that RAM and Optane are 2 different things?
This is very cut and dry. They knew what people would think and they used this against them.
Yes. Unless Optane Memory is byte-addressable like RAM is, and is directly re-writable, like RAM, and doesn't require the read-modify-write that NAND does, then IMHO it IS false advertising.
https://www.pcper.com/news/Memory/S...g-24GB-memory-8GB-DDR4-and-16GB-Optane-Memory
But will it allow you to run more applications or games that might need or want more than 8GB of system memory? No.
Emphasis mine. FALSE ADVERTISING.
Edit:
Guess I'm a bit late with this news, scooped by [H]ardOCP. Well, they're great chaps, anyways.
https://www.hardocp.com/news/2018/0..._optane_cache_drives_claiming_itrsquos_memory
Though, to my credit, all of the existing articles are about some Dell and HP laptops; my sighting was a new back-to-school 8th-Gen HP Desktop at Staples. So they're still at it, with the misleading specs.
Btw, back in the day, HP got (successfully) SUED, for their "HP Palm Pilot" (remember "PDAs", before Android took over?), because the display screen was advertised as 65535 colors, which is 16-bit, and it turned out, it only really had 4096, because it used 12-bit color with dithering?
Anyways, specs are important, and my gut feeling is, they would lose a class-action, based on AT LEAST these two factors:
1) Optane Memory NVMe, is NOT byte-addressable like RAM, and may require read-modify-write operations,
2) It does NOT allow one to run applications programs that require MORE than 8GB of working-set RAM, effectively, in the SAME manner that a REAL "24GB" of DRAM would allow.
IMHO, it's an open-and-shut case.
Edit: My opinion:
"I think, that at a time when PC sales are overall flat, and the industry is in a decline, that it was a MAJOR MISTAKE, of Intel, colluding with major PC OEMs HP and Dell, to effectively lie to their collective customers, and exaggerate the utility and performance of their Optane Memory cache device, when it is no-where near the performance and utility of actual DDR4 SDRAM. Customers that purchased these systems, expecting to be able to run and multi-task programs that ACTUALLY REQUIRE 24GB of RAM, are going to be SORELY DISAPPOINTED in the overall performance of their systems. Sure, Optane and 3DXpoint are great technologies, WHEN USED APPROPRIATELY, and with their functionality CLEARLY AND FULLY DISCLOSED."
Maybe I should buy one of these desktops advertised with "24GB memory", with an i7-8700 CPU, an 8th-Gen Core microprocessor with six cores and HyperThreading, and run BOINC, a distributed-computing controller program, with 12 "Tasks", one per CPU core/hyperthread, with the configuration with 8GB DDR4-2667 + 16GB Optane Memory cache, and another otherwise-identical system, with 24GB of REAL DDR4-2667, and a HDD, and set both systems running, and monitor their task throughput over 24 hours. (Running a project that requires nearly 2GB of RAM per task, thus 24GB.)
I think that those performance benchmarks would be rather.... elucidating.
