SDRAM Chip Set Boldly Goes Where No Man Has Gone Before

摘要

When it comes to achieving more memory in the same amount of space, we typically talk about process shrinks, die stacking, multichip packaging, and other techniques. But MetaRAM, a fabless company that recently "de-cloaked," has shot its new DIMM-based SDRAM torpedoes into the market and scored a direct hit. Web 2.0-type applications are causing bottlenecks in memory usage. Also, processing power is doubling every 18 months while DRAM capacity doubles only every 36 months. So far, the industry has countered this two-pronged attack with higher capacity and much more expensive DRAM-based dual-inline memory modules (DIMMs). Meanwhile, another unfortunate side effect of the increase in memory bandwidth is a reduction in the number of DIMMs per channel. As the bandwidth has increased from 533 to 1600 Mbits/s, for example, the number of DIMMs per channel has fallen from four to one. MetaRAM's MetaSDRAM chip set not only increases the capacity of a DRAM-based DIMM by a factor of four, it's also significantly cheaper and uses less power than technologies that use other methods to attain the same capacity on a DIMM (Fig. 1). The increased capacity is realized without any infrastructure or software changes (Fig. 2).