Intel’s Alan Gara on DRAM Memory Limitations for Exascale

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.

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