Reviving Intel Optane? Dev Proposes It as a Tertiary Memory Layer for Local LLMs
Sadge404 · reddit · 2026-08-09
A developer on Reddit proposed a bold hardware concept: utilizing discontinued Intel Optane technology to bridge the gap between system RAM and NVMe SSDs, acting as a tertiary cache for local LLM weights.
They noted that Optane's access speed is much closer to RAM than NVMe. If an architecture could leverage three layers of sparsity (such as combining DeepSeek's conditional memory mechanism), a used P5800X offering around 400GB of space could be fully utilized to significantly enhance local LLM capabilities.
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