Intel has been drowning in bad news about chip the level flaws known as Meltdown and Spectre. Intel had 5 lawsuits hit them initially as we reported on Monday and noticed today that they were hit with another four since posting our report. Today we learned that the Korean law firm Damwoo (not to be confused with damn you) is preparing a lawsuit against Intel. They may decide to launch it in the U.S. because of the difficulty of filing class action lawsuits in Korea.

Through all that noise Intel has been busy at CES 2018 showcasing a wide variety of major developments and one that will really please PC enthusiasts is Intel's new Optane SSD lineup for 2018.

If you're not familiar with Optane vs. SSDs yet, you could learn quickly by viewing this 8 minute video that is definitely hyper, but drives home the message very clearly that Optane is the future hands down.

A new report published yesterday afternoon, we learn that Intel announced the first consumer Optane SSD on Tuesday at CES. Dubbed the 800P, Intel said two models of the 800P will ship in M.2 trim: a 58GB version and a 118GB version. Both will be bootable and will come with a two-lane (x2) PCIe configuration more than 200GB per day.

The 800P is the third of Intel's much-hyped Optane drives. The first was Optane Memory; it used a 16GB or 32GB drive as a cache along with a mechanical drive and was intended for mainstream consumers.

The second drive, the 280GB or 480GB 900P, is a high-performance PCIe device aimed at enthusiasts. It ranges in cost from $400 to $600.

You could learn more about this at PCWorld

The desktop is going to get a little more love in 2018. On Monday Patently Apple posted a report titled "AMD is Quickly Advancing Desktops with 12nm 'Zen +' CPUs for Q2 2018 and a Leap to 7nm with 'Zen 3' for 2019." We also learned that Intel's updated Thunderbolt 3 will be coming to market later this year with more advantages.

Intel introduced their 8th Gen Core processors in late 2017 with 6 cores and it's been rumored that their 9th Gen Core processors will introduce 8 cores into the mainstream market. Some of Intel's Core 9000 series basics leaked late last fall over at AnandTech.

And maybe, just maybe to top it all off, Apple will be bringing their all-new modular desktops to market to really shake things up. And who knows, perhaps Apple will adopt the new Optane drives or at least make them available as a pro option.

The only question hanging over the PC market for 2018 is whether consumers will want buy expensive new desktops knowing that the core chips from Intel have serious security flaws built in. Even with patches, consumers may hesitate or switch to AMD.

Yet those who want Intel's Optane SSD's may overlook the flaw knowing that any lag over the patches will be squashed by the performance bump from the new drives.

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