AMD licenses ZRAM generation 2

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Gawd
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http://www.cieonline.co.uk/cie2/articlen.asp?pid=1486&id=15805

The key to achieving the significant increase in speed and reduction in power consumption offered by ZRAM Gen2 bit cells can be seen in the diagram. Invented by ISi’s chief scientist and co-founder, Dr Serguei Okhonin, ZRAM Gen2 stores significantly more charge in the memory bit cell than was previously possible. The additional charge provides an order-of-magnitude improvement in both cell margin – the difference between a “1” and a “0” – and in bit cell data retention time.

The data in the diagram shown was taken as a direct reading from a test device, rather than a simulation, and shows an almost digital response for Gen2. The higher charge margin provides much faster data read and write times – more than double the speed of previous ZRAM devices – yet because retention time is also lengthened, fewer refreshes are necessary. So the power consumption is also significantly reduced – by 75% in the case of memory read power, and by a massive 90% when writing to the memory. As a result, ZRAM Gen2 significantly broadens the range of applications that can take advantage of ZRAM’s density to both high-performance applications requiring greater than 1GHz operation (when pipelined), and low-power applications that require long-battery life.
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Yup, I remember when they first licensed ZRAM. A novel concept, using the existing parasitic capacitance of the ZRAM for storage.

I forsee massive L3 caches in AMD's future. This probably won't find its way into Barcelona, but perhaps within another year we may see it.

L2 will probably remain SRAM, DRAM is just not fast enough.
 
defaultluser said:
I forsee massive L3 caches in AMD's future. This probably won't find its way into Barcelona, but perhaps within another year we may see it.

L2 will probably remain SRAM, DRAM is just not fast enough.
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I can't say I disagree. I'm very excited about the possibilities for the future though. Perhaps around the late 2008 to 2009 time frame. Scientia from AMDZone suggested that Zram might make a good cache for when AMD's CPUGPU combo comes out. It's an interesting idea.
 
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