What Memory Will Intel’s Purley Platform Use?

Part of Intel Purley SlideThere has been quite a lot of interest over the past few days about the apparently-inadvertent disclosure by Intel of its server platform roadmap.  Detailed coverage in The Platform showed a couple of slides with key memory information for the upcoming Purley server platform which will support the Xeon “Skylake” processor family.  (A review of this post on 7/13/17 revealed that The Platform’s website has disappeared.  The above link and the next one no longer work.)

One slide, titled: “Purley: Biggest Platform Advancement Since Nehalem” includes this post’s graphic, which tells of a memory with: “Up to 4x the capacity & lower cost than DRAM, and 500x faster than NAND.”

The Memory Guy puzzled a bit about what this might be.  The only memory chip technology today with a cost structure lower than that of DRAM is NAND flash, and there is unlikely to be any technology within the leaked roadmap’s 2015-2017 time span that will change that.  MRAM, ReRAM, PCM, FRAM, and other technologies can’t beat DRAM’s cost, and will probably take close to a decade to get to that point.

Since that’s the case, then what is this mystery memory?  If we think of Continue reading “What Memory Will Intel’s Purley Platform Use?”