LPDDR2 and Mobile Market Trends

To offer some additional insight on today’s LPDDR2 announcement and trends in the mobile market, we sat down with Eric Spanneut, Micron’s director of mobile memory marketing.

Micron today announced a 2Gb monolithic LPDDR2 part, which would enable 8Gb packages for smart phones and tablet PCs. Are we really starting to see mobile applications that need this level of performance and DRAM density? How do they make use of it?
There are a lot of designs that need up to 4Gb LPDRAM this year, and we’re also seeing some designs in the tablet PC market that will need up to 8Gb, although the demand for this density is still pretty small. The fundamental drivers for higher density are multimedia applications and OS requirements. We also see a similar movement happening on the processor side with these vendors upgrading their chipsets and expressing a need for higher density LPDRAM, and NAND as well.

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Driving the Next Generation of Server Performance with LRDIMMs

Today we announced the world’s first DDR3 LRDIMMs, built with our advanced 50nm, 2Gb DDR3 components. If you’re in the server industry, you know that load-reduced DIMMs are going to deliver some much-needed performance and bandwidth boosts for next-generation servers. Their much higher capacity and performance specs mean that early LRDIMM servers will have up to 57% better bandwidth and as much as three times the memory density—up to 144GB. And you can expect those specs to rise as mainstream DDR3 production moves from 2Gb components to 4Gb and beyond.

How do they do it? Basically, an eight-rank LRDIMM can reduce memory load to a single load per channel (traditional RDIMM loads correspond to the number of ranks; dual-rank=2 loads, quad-rank=4 loads). Lower loads means you can put more DIMMs on a channel (and/or run the modules faster, depending on the configuration), boosting performance and memory density. LRDIMMs are also capable of much higher densities than RDIMMs; we’re making 16GB LRDIMMs today and plan for higher densities in the future.

We’re currently sampling these to buffer suppliers (to make sure our LRDIMMs are as fast and reliable as possible) and a few select server OEMs. You can probably expect to see ultra-high density, high-performance LRDIMM servers hitting the market before mid-year 2010. Want to know more? Visit our LRDIMM home page for full specs.

Power and Performance

DDR3 SODIMM: Small package, big low-power performance

If you design electronics, you’re used to thinking of power savings and performance as opposite poles—you’ve typically had to trade one to get the other. But it really is possible to deliver low power with high performance. In fact, we’ve found ways to continually reduce DRAM power needs while still hitting aggressive performance targets. It’s a strategy we’re calling “performance efficiency.” We see lots of opportunity for our DRAM to make a significant difference in a variety of applications—now and in the years ahead. We can save power and still deliver unprecedented levels of performance.

As a proof point, today Micron announced a new line of high-performance DDR3 SODIMMs that run at just 1.35V (standard DDR3 DIMMs run at 1.5V). That .15V difference may seem miniscule, but it amounts to a significant power savings—our estimates put it at about 20%. But the cool thing is that these SODIMMs aren’t any slower than their power-hungry siblings. They can hit 1333 MT/s in stride—plenty of throughput for the latest generation of high-performance laptops. Check them out: view DDR3 1.35V SODIMMs.

Memory: A Data Center Opportunity

New York Times published a feature article in its Sunday, June 14th edition on the topic of data centers. Sounds just like something you would expect in the Sunday Times, no? You see, for those outside of the engineering and technology world, the term “data centers” isn’t as widely understood, nor should it be, really. But it’s important to understand that without these data centers, we wouldn’t have today’s social networking applications. Got that? No Facebook. No Twitter. No YouTube.

As data centers continue to multiply at unprecedented levels, the technology community has been looking for ways to make their products more energy efficient – because these are the products that use the power to keep the data centers humming.

A sneak peek inside one of these data centers would reveal thousands or tens of thousands of servers. Servers are similar to PCs in that they use the same microchips—CPUs and memory. Yes, memory, and lots of it. And as EE Times recently put it “the notoriously voracious microprocessor is passing the power-hog mantle to the DRAM,” consuming quite a surprising amount of power – approximately 15%, according to the Burton Group. And for every Watt of power that goes into a piece of IT equipment, it takes another Watt to power and cool it.

Bill Tschudi, program manager at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, said that the push to make data centers more energy efficient will include several items including improved IT practices and “advancements on the memory side.”

At Micron, we’ve taken a lead on these memory advancements with our own line of energy-efficient data center memory.

To illustrate how our memory is helping green up data centers, let’s compare standard DDR2 and DDR3 memory to our energy efficient line. Standard DDR2 and DDR3 used in data center servers typically operates at 1.8V and 1.5V, respectively. Through clever changes in the memory architecture, we were able to reduce the operating voltage on DDR2 to 1.5V and on DDR3 to 1.35V. This means that Micron’s 1.5V DDR2 can realize a whopping 58 percent power savings over the standard 1.8V memory modules while the 1.35V DDR3 uses 21 percent less power than its 1.5V predecessor. Over time, these energy efficiencies gained can add up to big cost savings while reducing the impact on Mother Earth; something we can all feel good about.

Our commitment to energy efficient memory doesn’t just stop at data centers. We’ve got some new innovations coming down the pike this week so stay tuned (or follow us using Twitter’s data center) to learn more on how Micron is leading the way in the energy efficient memory movement.