When the article mentions faster non-volatile memory, are they referring to NVMe SSDs or Intel's Optane? Are SSDs that much faster to merit a new memory management strategy?
Optane is fast enough to be qualitatively more similar to RAM than to disk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwy4ujt0qHM The video shows that performance varies with workload differently from RAM though, so I think having a separate class for it is appropriate.
The blender benchmark is impressive. CPU utilisation increased from 30-50% to 60%-100% by using optane as swap vs a regular SSD. Optane is still a very early product and it's beating conventional SSDs already.
Optane DIMMs I think. They plug into the RAM slots :P