According to PC World,  Intel wants to make adoption of Optane easy for makers of PCs and servers regardless of the chips they use

For those who came in late, Optane is a brand name for a new class of storage and memory that could make PCs significantly faster. It is based on 3D XPoint, which Intel claims can be 10 times faster than flash storage and DRAM.

The outfit might have a point. Facebook said that when it tested Optane SSD prototypes in its servers and found that data throughput increased by three times, allowing for faster movement of data between the storage device and CPU.

Intel appears to be doing its best to make Optane backward-compatible with industry-standard interfaces so drives and memory can be plugged into existing slots.

Rob Crooke, senior vice president and general manager of the company's Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group said that it is similar to the way the first SSDs were fit into slower SATA slots meant for hard drives.

Crooke claims that Optane's benefits will be clearly felt in gaming and server applications. A particular game level can be pre-loaded on an SSD so users don't have to wait for chapters to load as they advance.

The first Optane SSDs will first be available at the end of the year for servers and high-end desktops. Some BIOS, engineering and validation work may be needed, but the goal is for Optane to work across PCs and servers.

This openness will mean that those wanting to run the technology with something like AMD's Zen chip will be able to do so.  Some gaming PC motherboards for AMD processors that support NVMe are already available from companies like MSI and Gigabyte.

Similarly, Intel is building 3D XPoint memory to be compatible with an advanced DDR4 technology, which is based on an industry-standard interface which will again help AMD.