Intel is currently facing some tough competition in the cut-throat CPU market in the form of AMD's latest Ryzen CPUs. However, the company has now unveiled some benchmark results for their new Optane storage modules, which is aimed at showing the world that they are still leading in the solid-state drive storage race.

The company previously lifted the curtains off their first-ever Optane storage modules earlier in the year and touted the new technology as the future of solid-state drives. However, the module that was being shown off was a low capacity drive that only had 32 GB of memory. Intel did mention that they will be coming out with modules with as much as 1.5 TB within the year.

As reported by ARS Technica, Intel has apparently started to ship their first large-capacity Optane modules, called the DC P4800X, over the weekend. The module has a total of 375 GB of usable storage and is priced at a whopping $1,520. The module is, of course, meant for heavy workstations and servers and Intel has yet to announce when it would be releasing a consumer-grade version.

Intel previously stated that the new Optane system, which uses a 3D Xpoint memory storage technique, will perform up to 10 times faster than regular solid-state drives. It has also hyped up the technology to be the way of the future that would ultimately replace conventional solid-state drives.

The recently released benchmark results do confirm that the Optane drives perform significantly faster than older SSDs, but these were only when large amounts of data were being processed. The new Optane DC P4800X was pitted against the three-year-old DC 3700 flash SSD, which is considered to be the fastest server-grade SSD Intel offers.

However, PC World claims that the technology might not unseat conventional SSDs right away as there is still quite a lot of work to be done before Optane drives become mainstream. Optane is still very expensive and remains to be under development. There are also some concerns regarding its durability and how it will function in real-world applications. However, when all the kinks are ironed out, the new Optane modules could very well drive SSD technology forward by leaps and bounds.