Intel’s Alan Gara on DRAM Memory Limitations for Exascale

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Alan GaraOver at The Register, Jack Clark writes that Intel’s plans for Exascale continue to hinge on the memory bandwidth and power consumption limitations of today’s DRAM.

When I look at directions we could go with HPC and how memory plays, I see it splitting into two directions: one is where we’re stuck with DRAM and have to live with DRAM a long time,” said Intel’s Alan Gara. “The other is ‘if one of these [new] memory technologies really does evolve, then things change dramatically.” These newer technologies include things like spin-transfer torque memory, nanomechanical RAM, phase-change memory, and other emerging non-volatile memory technologies. All of them hold the promise of a 5 to 10X improvement on DRAM performance, and some have new compute possibilities as well.

Read the Full Story.