Bobs,
Also, I'm wondering if this is an all EcoRam for Dram replacement or if there may still be some Dram in the system? The pictures of the DIMMs seemed to show only EcoRAM.
At the moment, this is an all EcoRAM in the system, using existing systems. This is done mainly from the POV of time to market.
IMO, it would be possible to make a system that uses both, but it is a much more challenging proposition. You need to have a chipset, BIOS, mobo and OEM willing to work with you, and time to market would be in years.
I think the approach is correct. It sacrifices maybe 80% or 90% of total market, but for the 10% to 20%, it may be an unbeatable proposition.
The way this could be expanded is by using some DRAM, as a write cache (or buffer) with appropriate cache hierarchy. That way, the total addressable market would go from 10% to 20% to high 90s.
Another way to get there partially is if processor caches expand dramatically. AMD was working at one point with a SOI memory technology that would greatly increase density over SRAM, allowing 10s or even 100s of MB of L3 cache. I don't know where that went...
The areas where it is not appropriate is where you have massive changes to contents of memory.
But, there is an opportunity. For example, take a plain vanilla database server with limited memory. Suppose you have 16 or 32 GB memory in the server, and a database that is 1 TB.
Well, in plain server, the server will loading, unloading, re-loading massive amounts of data. But if your server has 1 TB of memory, you have pretty much everything loaded already.
The tricky part is that when you have complicated queries, they need to write temporary tables, which complicates the issue. So again there is a need for some DRAM.
I didn't hear the Q&A yet, but I was encouraged that both Intel and AMD were present. They could actually make the full implementation (DRAM cache or write buffer, EcoRAM for main memory) happen, if they see the opportunity large enough for them.
Intel dumped NOR, and is looking for the way out of NAND as well (according to some rumors last week about Seagate being a potential buyer). So Intel may not have a dog in the race in the future, and may be impartial, or even supportive...
Joe |
