The press release for the "hybrid memory cube" came out in early December, but I hadn't heard of it until someone mentioned it to me today. I searched and no one else has posted anything.
It looks like it's a three-dimensional silicon structure in which you take flash memory, DRAM memory and then stick them onto a CPU like a miniature silicon chip sandwidth and then connect them with a technology called thru-silicon vias (TSV).
You get ridiculously high bandwidth from it. Since the traces are really short and you can use more pins, you can drive them in parallel and at higher frequencies without the issues that you run into a PCB routing to a DRAM. Similarly, you get much better latency and you get much better power efficiency. Since the wires are much shorter, it takes less power to drive them. And the whole motherboard will be much smaller because you won't have the DRAM portion any more.
On the flipside, if this happens then you won't be adding RAM to your computer any more. You'll buy your new 4GHz CPU with 4GB of onboard memory.
Here's a CNet article about it with a neat graphic of what it looks like:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-57332954-64/micron-to-tap-ibm-chip-stacking-tech-for-fast-memory/
Here's a blog about it from Intel with a nifty looking photo of what it looks like in real life:
http://blogs.intel.com/research/2011/09/15/hmc/
Here's a web page from the consortium working on it along with a video of it:
http://hybridmemorycube.org/technology.html
Looks like they'll have a specification later this year.
Oh, for full disclosure, I work an engineer at Intel, but I had never even heard that Intel was involved in this. I just posted it because I thought it was a neat topic to discuss.
It looks like it's a three-dimensional silicon structure in which you take flash memory, DRAM memory and then stick them onto a CPU like a miniature silicon chip sandwidth and then connect them with a technology called thru-silicon vias (TSV).
You get ridiculously high bandwidth from it. Since the traces are really short and you can use more pins, you can drive them in parallel and at higher frequencies without the issues that you run into a PCB routing to a DRAM. Similarly, you get much better latency and you get much better power efficiency. Since the wires are much shorter, it takes less power to drive them. And the whole motherboard will be much smaller because you won't have the DRAM portion any more.
On the flipside, if this happens then you won't be adding RAM to your computer any more. You'll buy your new 4GHz CPU with 4GB of onboard memory.
Here's a CNet article about it with a neat graphic of what it looks like:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-57332954-64/micron-to-tap-ibm-chip-stacking-tech-for-fast-memory/
Here's a blog about it from Intel with a nifty looking photo of what it looks like in real life:
http://blogs.intel.com/research/2011/09/15/hmc/
Here's a web page from the consortium working on it along with a video of it:
http://hybridmemorycube.org/technology.html
Looks like they'll have a specification later this year.
Oh, for full disclosure, I work an engineer at Intel, but I had never even heard that Intel was involved in this. I just posted it because I thought it was a neat topic to discuss.
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