It actually is just another type of SSD. It's just a NVMe drive. It's a little confusing because Intel markets "Optane" as so many different things. "Optane"

It actually is just another type of SSD. It's just a NVMe drive. It's a little confusing because Intel markets "Optane" as so many different things. "Optane" as marketed to the consumer is a combination of an Optane NVMe drive and motherboard-level support for disk caching. However, if you choose not to use the caching software, it just turns into a SSD. The only catch is that most optane drives are pretty small. The consumer ones intended for cache are about 16GB. However, you can buy bigger ones up to about 120GB in M.2 format, and PCIe or U.2 based ones up to 1.5 TB aimed at the prosumer market. AMD actually does really well with these because they have an extra x4 PCIe lanes (16+4 + 4 more for chipset) so you can run a graphics card at x16 speed and still have 4 more CPU-direct lanes for an Optane drive. Then on servers you have Optane DIMMs which sorta-not-really replace RAM for massive in-memory servers.