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."

Comments

Re:Apple should have considered?

[jcr]

Should have gone AMD, Steve.

Apple's already been down the road of choosing the apparently spiffier processor from a vendor that wasn't able to deliver in quantity. If AMD becomes the better processor choice in the future, then I'm sure Apple will switch again.

-jcr

I agree for different reasons.

[Andy Dodd]

To get into a console, you can't win if you fall into categories 1 or 2. If the Cell were that expensive or underperforming, people wouldn't be putting it into consoles.

Now, there is one thing about the Cell you missed - It's a special-purpose processor designed for raw floating point performance. 8 of the cores can only do basic streaming floating point (although they do it EXTREMELY fast), the remaining CPU is a VERY stripped down PPC.

So for a gaming system or DSP, the Cell will kick ass. For general purpose computing, it's going to suck.

there's a lot of assumption there...

[YesIAmAScript]

Note that if ZRAM works, it would let AMD put something like 4X as much cache on their chips in the same die area. This indeed would be quite a competitive advantage.

But why do people assume this will work? There's a couple companies trying to do this stuff (T-RAM is another) and none have succeeded yet.

It has proven to be difficult to get this kind of technology working in production chips. The main difficulty is that process control becomes very very important. Your yields drop through the floor.

Additionally, note that any 1T transistor technology is inherently a stored charge device (like EPROM, EEPROM or flash memory but different). The problem is that transistors on chips are getting so small that they have less than 100 electrons in the gate of a transistor. So your insulating ability becomes very important. Your chip is designed for electron mobility that electrons can flow around a fairly long loop (the instruction execution path) 1 million times in 1 millisecond. And now you have to make sure that 100 electrons sitting in one place don't leak out in that same time.

It's a challenge. It might be possible. I don't see any particular reason to think that AMD is going to be the one to do it though. Intel are wizards at process technology, as evidenced by their movement to 65nm before AMD. They don't happen to use SOI though, that's about the only advantage AMD has in this situation that I can see.

Anyway, I do like AMD (I'm typing this post on one), but them licensing some unproven technology from a 3rd party is no kind of condemnation of Intel or Apple's choice of Intel.