June 2017 – The Memory Guy Blog

Yesterday’s news really underscored the race currently underway between 3D NAND makers to produce higher layer counts than one another.

Intel produced an announcement in which VP Rob Crooke bragged that: “Intel has delivered the world’s first commercially available 64-layer, TLC, 3D NAND solid state drive (SSD). While others have been talking about it, we have delivered.”

The announcement explained that the new Intel SSD 545s could be purchased at Newegg beginning that day.

The Memory Guy received Intel’s announcement at 10:02 AM Pacific Time. By 3:11 PM, five hours later, there was another announcement in my “In” box, this time from Western Digital (WDC).

WDC’s e-mail announced the development of the the SanDisk/Toshiba next-generation BiCS4 3D NAND technology, with 96 layers. The companies expect to begin to sample a 256Gb part to OEM customers in the second half of 2017 with production starting by the end of next year.

One has to wonder if WDC was Continue reading “3D NAND: “I Have More Layers than You Do!””

Recently Rambus announced that it was using cryogenic temperatures to boost computer performance in large datacenters. This research is being done in a joint project with Microsoft who is developing a processor based on Josephson Junctions.

This is an effort to provide a performance increases greater than can be attained through standard semiconductor scaling. The research project aims to attain improvements in cycle time, power consumption, and compute density, leading to better energy efficiency and cost of ownership (COO). The companies hope to gain side benefits of being able to squeeze more bits onto a DRAM chip thus reducing cost per bit, improving performance, and making DRAM chips less costly to produce.

The system these two companies are researching uses a memory system that is cooled to 77 degrees Kelvin (77°K) with a processor that operates at 4°K. To do this the memory system is bathed in liquid nitrogen while the processor is cooled by liquid helium. The temperatures are the boiling points of these two liquids.

Surprisingly, the fact that these two subsystems are in different Continue reading “Super-Cooled DRAM for Big Power Savings”