Last week I was down in Micron’s Folsom office and interviewed Glen Hawk, Vice President of the Embedded Solutions Group to learn more about the recent acquisition of Numonyx and how it has helped shape a new era of growth for Micron in the Embedded market. Take a look at the video below.
Micron recently announced its new RLDRAM 3 memory designed specifically for high bandwidth, networking applications. Micron is working with a broad ecosystem of partners including Xilinx, a leading FPGA provider, who is designing RLDRAM 3 memory into their next generation, Virtex 7 line of products.
We had an opportunity to sit down with Rina Raman, Xilinx’s senior director of applications and technical marketing, to talk about their products, collaboration with Micron, and the broader trends affecting the networking market. Here are some highlights from that discussion.
Giga Om wrote an interesting article back in December on how much data America consumes. Based on UC San Diego’s research findings, it was reported that people in the U.S. accessed about 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008 (that’s 3.6 billion trillion bytes). For some visual frame of reference, that’s about the same amount of information included in “thick paperback novels stacked seven feet high over the entire U.S.—including Alaska.” Staggering numbers, right? We’re gluttons for information—and the numbers only continue to grow year after year.
Of course, the UCSD study was counting all types of information consumption, not just what courses over our computer networks. But there’s no question that our consumption is shifting rapidly to traditional and cellular networks. We’re going to need significant advancements in network bandwidth and technology to keep pace with the impending explosion.
Micron’s newly announced third generation RLDRAM memory is a great example of this type of technology. RLDRAM 3 enables a faster, more efficient transfer of data over the network by doubling performance and cutting latency to sub 10 nanoseconds (that’s a fraction of DDR3’s latency). It may not be the sexy sort of technology that grabs lots of headlines, but it is an important key to helping networking OEMs meet tomorrow’s challenging infrastructure demands.
Lexar Media today introduced the 64GB RealSSD™ C300, extending its award-winning portfolio to offer a high performing and affordable SSD option. Like its predecessors, the 64GB RealSSD C300 natively supports SATA 6Gb/s, offering the industry’s most compelling consumer SSD solution for capacity, price and performance.
We thought our readers might want to know more about the newest entry to the RealSSD line of products, so we sat down with Ben Thiel in Micron’s SSD group to shed some light on these new drives and trends in market adoption.
In recognition of Earth Day, we thought we’d publish a post on a certain “green” topic that we’re passionate about around here—the power and performance efficiencies achieved by using SSDs in enterprise servers. As you know, Micron has a lot to say on the topic, so we decided change it up a bit and bring in a longtime storage industry veteran to provide a different perspective. (BTW, we’ll have more to say on Micron SSDs in the enterprise here soon … stay tuned.)
While at Storage Networking World last week, we had the chance to meet up with Ray Lucchesi, president and lead storage analyst with Silverton Consulting, as well as blogger extraordinaire for RayOnStorage.com. We asked him to shed some light on the role of SSDs “greening-up” the data center:
Thanks for talking with us. To kick off the discussion, let’s look big picture at the challenges facing data centers today. Could you provide a little insight for our readers on what the top issues are for data center managers?
I think the problems facing data centers today center around 3 main themes:
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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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I attended Storage Networking World this week in Orlando, Florida where I had the chance to talk with Kevin Dibelius of Micron’s SSD group and learn more about their enterprise SSD initiatives. Take a look at the video for your “sneak peek” at the RealSSD P300.
Recently, I traveled to Lehi, Utah with a select group of media and industry analysts for a tour of IM Flash Technologies, the fabrication facility where we make our NAND flash memory. Together with some colleagues from Intel, we enjoyed a rare opportunity to see the inner workings of this state-of-the-art fab.
This was the first time Micron has ever allowed media and analysts inside the fab – an experience that many reported was well worth it. Just ask Allyn Malventano from PC Perspectives: “Getting a first-hand look at the bleeding edge of chip fabrication is something I know I’ll be talking about for years to come.”
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We’ve seen a lot of interest in our C300 SSD from Apple users, so we put two identical MacBooks side by side to show the huge performance gains possible with a RealSSD C300 drive.
There are a lot of thorough performance benchmarks out there—our effort here was to create a simple video that shows what differences you might expect to see in everyday applications when you install a RealSSD C300. We cloned the factory hard drive onto a Micron C300 SSD and ran a few simple tasks.
Now available through crucial.com—the RealSSD C300 client drive that everyone’s talking about. Crucial is offering the 2.5” drive in 128GB and 256GB densities (priced at $499.99 and $799.99, respectively).
Visit crucial.com for more information.
