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AMD Licenses Z-RAM Technology
ZuperDee writes "It appears AMD has licensed Z-RAM technology from Innovative Silicon for possible use in future processors. According to the article, this could lead to caches about 5 times denser than the SRAM that is normally used right now. C|Net says they will probably make the announcement on Monday."
Since IBM holds tons of patents related to SOI technology, I doubt it'll be 'cost-effective' for Intel anytime soon. The technology itself isn't the real issue here, it's the licensing.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
You should really ask that question as a submitted story or something, not bury it down here in the comments. However I'll try to give you my quick view of it:
Intel, despite having a virtual monopoly on the pc-cpu business, has never been as despised as for example Microsoft for the simple reason that they have always produced top quality. Sure you had to pay for their cpu's but they where generaly worth paying for. AMD always played catch-up technology and performance-wise, and therefore always had to sell their slightly worse performing cpu's at a slightly lower price. That changed with AMD's introduction of the original Athlon about 5 years ago or so (look up the exact dates if you like, I dont have the energy for it). It actually performed better than anything Intel had and was still slightly cheaper. It took a while for the market to realize this since the intel brand had a lot of momentum.
Most people with technical knowledge prefer AMD nowadays because a) everybody likes an underdog, and b) AMD has since the introduction of the Athlon kept their performance lead over intel. Because they've slowly but surely been gaining marketshare, AMD's prices has crept upwards to a point of almost matching Intels prices, but you still get a faster cpu for less money if you buy AMD. At the moment, Intel has nothing that can compete. Add to this the fact that AMD's processors also use less power than Intels Pentium 4-line and AMD has an even greater advantage.
Intel's lost a lot of credibility during the last years because of their attempts to out-market AMD despite the fact that their current netburst-based lineup has nothing on AMD's Athlon stuff. Everybody keeps waiting for Intel to pull an ace out of their sleeve and introduce somthing that kills AMD, but Intel has failed to deliver for many years now.
So basically, AMD is still the underdog that delivers the best *and* cheapest product, while Intel's marketing department is trying to save Intel.
Yeah, just like they switch between ATI and NVIDIA for graphics chips. The company with the better priced product wins (if it can deliver the quantities).
However, you seem to have missed the point of Z-ram: it's transistor based, but only uses aproximately 1 transistor per bit.
Among other interesting things, the linked article clames that Z-ram is twice as dense as capacitors based ram. The grandparent's question is valid.