Micron's PCIe SSD card - rumor

[mvrx]

I was chatting with a friend who is involved with some HPC clustering and SAN tech. He gets to test early SSD and clustering technologies and related stuff that is a bit above me. He is pretty excited about the Fusion IO stuff, he also mentioned that Micron Technologies had a PCIe based SSD product that is coming in 2009.

I found a couple videos and blurbs talking about Micron?s stuff.. Looks interesting, I wonder if they?ll really get more speed than what Fusion IO is talking about, but TBH, I think I?d be happy with anything in that speed range that worked.

So here?s the part I didn?t quite understand. Apparently there is speculation that a later version will possibly feature 4 DDR3 slots that will be compatible with 2, 4, 8, and 16GB DDR3 DIMMs.

This made me a bit curious? Anyone have any idea why they?d put both flash and DDR3 on a single card? What could be done with 64GB of ram if it?s on the PCIe bus instead of local to the CPU?

 

[aka1nas]

It would probably be used a cache(just like with high-end storage controllers). Likely that's a pretty high-end enterprise model in that case.

 

[mvrx]

Interesting... so 64GB of ram speed cache, on.. what.. a 128GB/256GB/etc card... With even the less advanced early caching algorithms, that sounds like a pretty high hit rate for read throughput.

I remember reading back with PCIe 2.0 was being discussed, people said that a memory expansion card would finally be possible.. Yet here we are a year or so from PCIe 3.0 and no one has made one. I realize it will never be as fast as memory right on the motherboard, but with Flash now being put into the equation, I would think some company would come up with some kind of hybrid design.

I'll probably find my thread 5 years from now when something like this comes to market and sigh that it took so long.. ;-)