Why using new DDR4 allow designing incredibly more efficient Server/Storage applications?

By SemiWiki

August 8, 2016

The old one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work anymore for DDR4 memory controller IP, especially when addressing the enterprise segments, or application like servers, storage and networking. For mobile or high end consumer segments, we can easily identify two key factors: price (memory amount or controller footprint) and power consumption. The enterprise specific requirements are clearly defined and the DDR4 memory sub-system has to support very large capacity, provide as high as possible bandwidth, low latency and comply with Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) stringent requirements.

Server or storage applications are designed to compute and store large amount of data. It has been proven that using DRAM instead of SSD or HDD to build new generation of server leads to x10 to x100 performance improvements (Apache SPARK, IBM DB2 with BLU, Microsoft In-Memory option, etc.), mostly linked with better latency and bandwidth offered by DRAM. To build these efficient database systems, you just need to be able to aggregate large DDR4 DRAM capacity, and we will see the various options available, like LRDIMM, RDIMM or 3DS architectures. At the DDR4 interface level, new equalization techniques will help supporting higher speed. Larger DRAM capacity multiplied by higher bandwidth is the winning recipe for higher performance compute and storage systems.

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