A requiem for Optane, Intel's KV Cache killer that could have eased the RAM price crunch

History is littered with the corpses of technologies that were ahead of their time, and Intel’s Optane storage and memory products are certainly among them.

Expensive, badly misunderstood, and awkwardly priced, the technology struggled to find a place in the market, surviving just five years before Chipzilla pulled the plug.

Things might have been different if it were launched today. The shift from AI training to inference has driven tremendous demand for DRAM and NAND flash. In fact, the same properties that made Optane a niche product a few years ago would have made it ideally suited to these write intensive AI workloads.

The rise and fall of Optane

Intel and Micron co-developed Optane – or more specifically, 3D XPoint memory – and unveiled it in 2015. It promised to bridge the gap between conventional NAND flash used in SSDs and DRAM used in DDR4 and (later) DDR5.

Like NAND,...

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