The statement in the headline is not a revelation. In February Intel company laid out the list of processors and chipsets 200 series, which it plans to provide compatibility with Optane series drives on 3D XPoint memory. The smallest processor on the list is the Core i3-7100 model at $ 120 (the 7th generation of the Intel Core i CPU, codenamed Kaby Lake). Processors of the Pentium and Celeron lines of the Kaby Lake generation have not been announced for the support of Intel Optane, and have not acquired it after the announcement of the caching SSD Optane of 16 and 32 GB.
The difference in price between the models Core i3-7100 and Pentium G4620 is only $ 28. But the latter is not compatible with the SSD Optane and differs from the first lack of support for AVX and a smaller clock speed of 200 MHz. There is a reasonable question, is it worth paying extra for the processor Core i3-7100 and 16 GB SSD Optane about $ 70, what would be the benefit of such an acquisition if instead you can take a capacious hard drive? And if you add a little more, you can take a fairly capacious budget SSD.
Why did Intel limit Optane support in the low-end environment? This question was asked by the authors of the Tech Report site to Intel representatives and they hope to hear the answer. Is it an artificial limitation, or architecture peculiarities? .