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