6 ms·

Rambus, Microsoft Put DRAM into Deep Freeze to Boost Performance

34 points by RmDen 9y ago

frik 9y ago
Is Rambus still a thing? I remember their vendor lockin RAM memory from Pentium 4 era. Later there were some bad PR and lawsuits, and the PC world moved on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus
- jandrese 9y ago
  My impression is that they were mostly killed by the higher price point for RAMBUS RAM. Performance wasn't improved enough to justify the price premium, and was worse in some cases (random access patterns).
- dheera 9y ago
  Also, I think people came to the realization that for most consumer use cases, if due to cost considerations you have to choose between more RAM or faster RAM, choose more RAM. Any swapping to disk will kill the speed advantages of faster RAM.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  Wow, I didn't know about the patent trolling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Patent_Lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Patent_Lawsuits I just remembered the Intel/Rambus boards that all had to be recalled because of Rambus issues (IIRC, the issue wasn't with the ram, but actually the boards themselves. Many of the boards were given to employees who took the ram and chucked the boards).
  - foobiekr 9y ago
    are you sure you aren't thinking of the dicing issues that caused chips to have eventual failure (used in some network products)?
  - yuhong 9y ago
    Yea, I think you are probably referring to how i820 RDRAM boards had to be limited to two slots. This kind of signal integrity issues is not limited to RDRAM.
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  I'll never select a Rambus product on any parts BOM I have influence over. Other engineers should do the same. Companies like them should be given the capitalism death penalty.
  - yuhong 9y ago
    They now have bought Inphi's memory buffer business I think. Of course, this is long after they give up on even XDR DRAM.
- baby 9y ago
  They bought Cryptography Research which is one of the most awesome crypto company out there (Paul Kocher, Mike Hamburg, ... I'm sure I'm missing others)
davidgerard 9y ago
Is this the same Rambus that essayed into patent trolling standards? If so, I'm surprised they didn't change their name.
- exhilaration 9y ago
  Yeah, it's a blast from the past. I was surprised to see them on the HN front page.
petra 9y ago
Why would cooling offer such big performance improvement to DRAM ? even if it improves transistor witching speed, wire switching speed shouldn't be affected and it is a significant component of latency , right ?
- Neliquat 9y ago
  I would imagine the cooling itself isnt so much speeding it up as it is making it reliable at higher clock speeds.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
JohnBooty 9y ago
> “Something not many people are talking about is playing the temperature card,” Bronner says [...] "All the talk I hear is about stretching Moore’s Law in the datacenter, such as using GPU accelerators. Those will work, but it’s a one-time shot. You use it once and you are done.” But isn't "the temperature card" something you only get to play once as well? Once you've adopted supercooled computing, where do you go from there? (This guy knows there's such a thing as absolute zero, and that you can't just keep getting colder, right?) Sorry, I guess I still have antipathy towards Rambus since the 1990s. =)
- MichaelBurge 9y ago
  Not sure about the physics, but supercooled chips might use superconductors. Those would have zero resistance, and maybe that means they'll emit hardly any heat. And since modern chips are so heat-constrained, it would allow them to change the design entirely.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I don't think the "one-time shot" thing is meant to say that such measures are useless. It merely means that you'll have to find new techniques beyond that one if you want to keep improving performance afterwards. The "temperature card" could be one.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
Heh, I thought "wait a minute didn't IBM do this 20 years ago and it was a total flop?" and yes, and its one of the same people involved. Cryogenic computing wasn't a bust because the technology didn't work. It does. It was a bust because silicon really hates to transition between cryogenic temperatures and room temperature. If you transition it quickly (say you pull a card out of the liquid nitrogen and start working on it) it will crack as it warms up unevenly. As a result you needed anywhere from 20 to 48 hours to get a card from 'cryo' temp to 'room' temp, and while you could cool a bit faster it still took longer than just dumping it in LN2. So repairs and maintenance were multi-day affairs. Compare that to a modern AWS, Google, or Azure data center where a system fails, a tech can skate out to it with a new motherboard, pull the old one, put the new one in, and poof you're back on line in under 30 minutes. As a result cryo computers either had to have failure rates that were so low that a repair that required transitioning the hardware through a cold/warm/cold cycle rarely happened, or you had to have enough extra hardware to support your base load while part of it was slowly going through the cold/warm/cold cycle. I don't know how much IBM spent, but it was a lot and they never cracked that nut.
- AdamJacobMuller 9y ago
  It also seems to me that even if you accept all of those things as fact and are OK with them, say in an O&G HPC workload where you cool the DC, run for a few days/weeks and then go offline to fix issues until the next run, isn't the amount of energy and cost required way higher than just having more compute resources? Ultimately its just dollars per compute and it seems highly dubious to me that supercooling your components, even if you accept high failure rates and long lead times, is going to move that needle in a positive direction.
- derefr 9y ago
  > Compare that to a modern AWS, Google, or Azure data center where a system fails, a tech can skate out to it with a new motherboard, pull the old one, put the new one in, and poof you're back on line in under 30 minutes. Modularity is better now than it was then. I could very much see the possibility of having pressure-sealed internally-cryo-maintained enclosures (like the pressure-sealed internally-helium WD hard drives), as hot-swappable modules with e.g. Thunderbolt 3.1 connectivity to connect the enclosure-module to your other components. This approach would work fine for, say, enclosing NVMe. And, conveniently, repair would be facilitated by the inside of the enclosure staying cold even after you yank it out of the machine. A daughterboard in a thermos! For actual DRAM DIMMs, though, you'd have to "enclose" the motherboard itself into such a module—at which point that "module" is the computer, and you're more just talking about the old blade-server paradigm of externalizing as many components as possible to live on the rack, so that the server blades could be treated as commodity parts and swapped out like any other.
jdonaldson 9y ago
If they were smart, they'd advertise this with : "Tech Ops HATES him! Check out this one weird trick that increases your memory speed 200%!!!"

34 points by RmDen 9y ago

frik 9y ago

Is Rambus still a thing? I remember their vendor lockin RAM memory from Pentium 4 era. Later there were some bad PR and lawsuits, and the PC world moved on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus

jandrese 9y ago
My impression is that they were mostly killed by the higher price point for RAMBUS RAM. Performance wasn't improved enough to justify the price premium, and was worse in some cases (random access patterns).
dheera 9y ago
Also, I think people came to the realization that for most consumer use cases, if due to cost considerations you have to choose between more RAM or faster RAM, choose more RAM. Any swapping to disk will kill the speed advantages of faster RAM.
djsumdog 9y ago
Wow, I didn't know about the patent trolling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Patent_Lawsuits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambus#Patent_Lawsuits I just remembered the Intel/Rambus boards that all had to be recalled because of Rambus issues (IIRC, the issue wasn't with the ram, but actually the boards themselves. Many of the boards were given to employees who took the ram and chucked the boards).
- foobiekr 9y ago
  are you sure you aren't thinking of the dicing issues that caused chips to have eventual failure (used in some network products)?
- yuhong 9y ago
  Yea, I think you are probably referring to how i820 RDRAM boards had to be limited to two slots. This kind of signal integrity issues is not limited to RDRAM.
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
I'll never select a Rambus product on any parts BOM I have influence over. Other engineers should do the same. Companies like them should be given the capitalism death penalty.
- yuhong 9y ago
  They now have bought Inphi's memory buffer business I think. Of course, this is long after they give up on even XDR DRAM.
baby 9y ago
They bought Cryptography Research which is one of the most awesome crypto company out there (Paul Kocher, Mike Hamburg, ... I'm sure I'm missing others)

davidgerard 9y ago

Is this the same Rambus that essayed into patent trolling standards? If so, I'm surprised they didn't change their name.

exhilaration 9y ago
Yeah, it's a blast from the past. I was surprised to see them on the HN front page.

petra 9y ago

Why would cooling offer such big performance improvement to DRAM ? even if it improves transistor witching speed, wire switching speed shouldn't be affected and it is a significant component of latency , right ?

Neliquat 9y ago
I would imagine the cooling itself isnt so much speeding it up as it is making it reliable at higher clock speeds.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

JohnBooty 9y ago

> “Something not many people are talking about is playing the temperature card,” Bronner says [...] "All the talk I hear is about stretching Moore’s Law in the datacenter, such as using GPU accelerators. Those will work, but it’s a one-time shot. You use it once and you are done.” But isn't "the temperature card" something you only get to play once as well? Once you've adopted supercooled computing, where do you go from there? (This guy knows there's such a thing as absolute zero, and that you can't just keep getting colder, right?) Sorry, I guess I still have antipathy towards Rambus since the 1990s. =)

MichaelBurge 9y ago
Not sure about the physics, but supercooled chips might use superconductors. Those would have zero resistance, and maybe that means they'll emit hardly any heat. And since modern chips are so heat-constrained, it would allow them to change the design entirely.
mikeash 9y ago
I don't think the "one-time shot" thing is meant to say that such measures are useless. It merely means that you'll have to find new techniques beyond that one if you want to keep improving performance afterwards. The "temperature card" could be one.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

Heh, I thought "wait a minute didn't IBM do this 20 years ago and it was a total flop?" and yes, and its one of the same people involved. Cryogenic computing wasn't a bust because the technology didn't work. It does. It was a bust because silicon really hates to transition between cryogenic temperatures and room temperature. If you transition it quickly (say you pull a card out of the liquid nitrogen and start working on it) it will crack as it warms up unevenly. As a result you needed anywhere from 20 to 48 hours to get a card from 'cryo' temp to 'room' temp, and while you could cool a bit faster it still took longer than just dumping it in LN2. So repairs and maintenance were multi-day affairs. Compare that to a modern AWS, Google, or Azure data center where a system fails, a tech can skate out to it with a new motherboard, pull the old one, put the new one in, and poof you're back on line in under 30 minutes. As a result cryo computers either had to have failure rates that were so low that a repair that required transitioning the hardware through a cold/warm/cold cycle rarely happened, or you had to have enough extra hardware to support your base load while part of it was slowly going through the cold/warm/cold cycle. I don't know how much IBM spent, but it was a lot and they never cracked that nut.

AdamJacobMuller 9y ago
It also seems to me that even if you accept all of those things as fact and are OK with them, say in an O&G HPC workload where you cool the DC, run for a few days/weeks and then go offline to fix issues until the next run, isn't the amount of energy and cost required way higher than just having more compute resources? Ultimately its just dollars per compute and it seems highly dubious to me that supercooling your components, even if you accept high failure rates and long lead times, is going to move that needle in a positive direction.
derefr 9y ago
> Compare that to a modern AWS, Google, or Azure data center where a system fails, a tech can skate out to it with a new motherboard, pull the old one, put the new one in, and poof you're back on line in under 30 minutes. Modularity is better now than it was then. I could very much see the possibility of having pressure-sealed internally-cryo-maintained enclosures (like the pressure-sealed internally-helium WD hard drives), as hot-swappable modules with e.g. Thunderbolt 3.1 connectivity to connect the enclosure-module to your other components. This approach would work fine for, say, enclosing NVMe. And, conveniently, repair would be facilitated by the inside of the enclosure staying cold even after you yank it out of the machine. A daughterboard in a thermos! For actual DRAM DIMMs, though, you'd have to "enclose" the motherboard itself into such a module—at which point that "module" is the computer, and you're more just talking about the old blade-server paradigm of externalizing as many components as possible to live on the rack, so that the server blades could be treated as commodity parts and swapped out like any other.

jdonaldson 9y ago

If they were smart, they'd advertise this with : "Tech Ops HATES him! Check out this one weird trick that increases your memory speed 200%!!!"