There's no new Optane hardware yet, just a renewed attempt to push Optane caching for mobile use. Intel plans to release cache-sized Optane SSDs that have low power idle states, to replace last year's 16GB and 32GB modules that idle at 1W.

Intel is also updating their Windows drivers to enable Optane caching of non-boot drives. For the past year, Optane Memory caching has only been usable for the boot volume. This driver update should be available for both the new platforms and for all existing Kaby Lake platforms that support the original Optane Memory implementation, since there's no motherboard firmware functionality that needs to be updated for non-boot volumes.

I think that's compared to loading from a 5400rpm mechanical hard drive. I'll easily believe that optane is 4.7x faster than that.

I also expect most high-end NVME SSDs are going to be in a similar ballpark, maybe "only" 4.5x faster or something.

Optane performs much better at low queue depths which accounts for many common workloads, and has better power usage at these depths -- this lets it compete with NVMe at the same performance for many tasks with a smaller footprint (e.g. battery). It's not all about peak GB/s, though to be fair not even Intel's blurb makes this obvious...

That said it's quite possible NVMe drives will be "good enough" where PCI-e Optane never makes major inroads, even just in terms of pure volume. The dollar-per-GB needs to come down a lot, still.

Optane in DIMM form is also still MIA. I'm extremely skeptical it will live up to the original hype it was put through ("thousands of times faster") but I imagine it will be able to outclass many competitors.

This claim doesn't make sense to me. I think game loading times are primarily limited by the hard drive. It's about loading data from there into RAM (and/or GPU RAM). The hard drive would be the bottleneck.

Optane is a brand that covers both the harddrive and RAM. For non-SSD HDDs it will provide a cache on commonly accessed files, providing a big boost to disk HDs and a minor boost to SSDs. Which is why I asked if people have noticed an improvement in practice with either the HD or RAM options, as I assume most people here have SSDs.