Maybe in like 5 years when it's adopted by others, or on board cache is a thing by then and it will be obsolete by HBM stacks on the CPU is a thing.
IMO these desktop caches exist mostly to give new tech some traction. Let's be honest: Intel aims for laptop domination.
They've already announced that next mobile CPU gen will include WiFi, but the Optane thing is even more important.
Think about the current situation:
1) To get a notebook with decent NVMe disk one usually has to prepare over $1000.
2) Notebooks priced between $500 and $1000 have lesser SSDs which can still be improved by a fast cache.
3) However, low-end is really interesting. Here you end up with either a slow HDD or some awful flash memory that could be even slower than those 5400rpm.
With a cost-efficient Optane cache (and the prices will drop with large volume), you can make all these laptops feel a lot more similar in daily consumer-ish tasks (browsing, casual gaming etc) and some more advanced stuff as well.
This is not just a performance boost. It's a significant qualitative change - something relaly worth looking forward to.
I find it pretty shocking that people here commonly believe in a soon-to-happen 8-core software optimization (because now maybe 2% of consumers will have them instead of 1%
), but at the same so few believe in caching solutions.
In truth an increase in core number really mattered only once: when we got the second one.