2 ms·

Watch this fade into obscurity the same as Intel's 3D X point. The world is not ready for the diseconomies of scale of a second memory type. DRAM and SSD fabs

Watch this fade into obscurity the same as Intel's 3D X point. The world is not ready for the diseconomies of scale of a second memory type. DRAM and SSD fabs are struggling so why shouldn't they? Goodbye promising technology!

rmbyrro 3y ago
It doesn't need to have consumer-wide adoption to be a success. They can cater to a niche business market to which UltraRAM can add ultra-high value (pun intended) for particular data processing or persistence needs. One idea that comes to my mind is stock markets. Automated traders took over it and their fight in on the sub-milisecond scale. Imagine how much an investment bank would pay for UltraRAM if it allows them to process real time data much faster and make ultra-money with it? (again, intended and not sorry about that!)
- cultureswitch 3y ago
  Closer to home, I can think of a few competitive video game players with more money than sense who would spend in the thousands for a DRAM replacement that allows to go from 150FPS to 300FPS. Depending on workload, DRAM latency generally ends up being the bottleneck at such high refresh rates.
m_eiman 3y ago
Assuming it can be as dense physically as current flash and RAM, there is a pretty nice market to target in mobile devices that's always looking for things that can lower battery use. Conveniently that's also a market where Apple and Google have enough control over the software side to make things work with a new, weird memory scheme (RAM slower than permanent storage, but still needed because of durability).
ilaksh 3y ago
LLMs/multimodal large models are looking for something like this. They will easily absorb the gains.
nagisa 3y ago
Well, on the other hand GDDR and HBM are two competing technologies both of which are still reasonably alive, with HBM being a promising candidate to replace GDDR for good eventually.

rmbyrro 3y ago

It doesn't need to have consumer-wide adoption to be a success. They can cater to a niche business market to which UltraRAM can add ultra-high value (pun intended) for particular data processing or persistence needs. One idea that comes to my mind is stock markets. Automated traders took over it and their fight in on the sub-milisecond scale. Imagine how much an investment bank would pay for UltraRAM if it allows them to process real time data much faster and make ultra-money with it? (again, intended and not sorry about that!)

cultureswitch 3y ago
Closer to home, I can think of a few competitive video game players with more money than sense who would spend in the thousands for a DRAM replacement that allows to go from 150FPS to 300FPS. Depending on workload, DRAM latency generally ends up being the bottleneck at such high refresh rates.

m_eiman 3y ago

Assuming it can be as dense physically as current flash and RAM, there is a pretty nice market to target in mobile devices that's always looking for things that can lower battery use. Conveniently that's also a market where Apple and Google have enough control over the software side to make things work with a new, weird memory scheme (RAM slower than permanent storage, but still needed because of durability).

ilaksh 3y ago

LLMs/multimodal large models are looking for something like this. They will easily absorb the gains.

nagisa 3y ago

Well, on the other hand GDDR and HBM are two competing technologies both of which are still reasonably alive, with HBM being a promising candidate to replace GDDR for good eventually.