Micron Innovations Blog » performance

An Engineer’s Dream Come True: HMC named “Best Technology of 2011”

Brent Keeth — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:11:16 +0000

When you’ve invested a lot of hours and hard work into developing a new technology, it’s rewarding when your labors get noticed. That’s why we were especially excited when our Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) received some really BIG attention, The Linley Group’s Analysts’ Choice Award for “Best Technology of 2011.”

HMC has been in development since 2006 and represents the combined efforts of three cross-functional teams: logic layer designers, DRAM design engineers, and our advanced packaging team. These teams were challenged to think beyond the evolutionary path of memory and focus on developing a technology that would overshoot industry expectations in terms of raw bandwidth and energy efficiency—an engineer’s dream come true!

One of the more unusual challenges we faced was how to test HMC—its performance is literally off the scale, which means there’s no existing infrastructure that would be able to measure the remarkable specs it delivers. So we designed HMC to measure itself, literally—the testing capability is built right into the chip.

Now that we’re moving from the prototype stage toward actual production of this revolutionary product, the HMC Consortium (HMCC) is leading the effort to create in industry-adoptable standard and bring HMC to market.

More information:
Read the press release about HMC’s “Best Technology of 2011” award.
Learn more about HMC technology
Find out about the HMC Consortium at hybridmemorycube.org

A Faster RealSSD™ C400

Ben Thiel — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:49:15 +0000

Like any innovative tech company, we’re always searching for ways to make our products better. We’ve engineered some big read performance gains that will make a noticeable difference for our C400 and m4 SSDs. We’re bundling the improvements into our latest firmware release, which is available now for all customers.

Like any firmware release, we built in the usual stability and reliability improvements that our testing team identified over the past months. But the real news is that the new code provides a significant boost in read performance across all capacities. Sequential reads are up by 20% for all drives (85 MB/s increase), putting the C400/m4 over the 500 MB/s mark. Random 4k reads are up, too. And PCMark scores—which we believe are one of the better measures of real-world usage—are up by 15%.

The table below summarizes the basic spec changes.

	Original	With New FW
Sequential READ	415 MB/s	500 MB/s	20% faster
4k Read IOPs	40k	45k	12% faster

Of course, to appreciate these changes, you’ll need to be running the SSD on a system that provides a SATA 6 Gb/s connection (since SATA 3 Gb/s systems cap out at less than 300 MB/s).

Micron customers will be notified of the code change (and how to upgrade) through our usual PCN process. If you’re a retail customer, you can find instructions to download the latest code on Crucial’s website.

Our client SSDs are already a favorite among users who value stability, reliability, and good performance at a great price. This upgrade makes the C400/m4 SSDs an even more compelling choice, and is a great way to thank all of our customers for choosing Micron. Enjoy!

Is Bandwidth per Watt Important to You?

Steven King — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 14:09:20 +0000

Today’s networking OEMs face the challenging task of designing for seemingly opposite goals—high performance in an energy-conscious “green” environment.

The EPA estimates* that in 2006 the nation’s servers and data centers used about 1.5% of the total U.S. electricity consumption—a whopping 61 billion kilowatt hours (kWh)—at a cost of $4.5 billion. In 2011 these figures could nearly double, reaching more than 100 billion kWh, at a staggering annual cost of $7.4 billion.

As one of the fastest-growing energy-use sectors in the nation, servers and data storage centers need a memory solution that can satisfy their rigorous performance demands while delivering the potential for significant improvements in energy efficiency. We put together these comparison charts to show how today’s leading memory technologies stack up in terms of bandwidth per watt:

Cyclical (or Random) Bank READs

1:1 READ-to-WRITE Operation

*Source: http://www.energystar.gov

750,000 IOPs from a Single SSD?

Janene Ellefson — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 21:43:34 +0000

As promised, the video below is a live demo of the phenomenal performance you can get from our P320h PCIe SSD. It’s a simple and straightforward IOMeter measurement, but we wanted to show you how much of a leap our card makes over current solutions—the random reads output of the P320h is more than twice as fast as the nearest competitor.

It all hinges on the tight integration we’ve been able to make between our custom controller and high-performance SLC NAND. I’m looking forward to keeping you posted on what our customers are be able to achieve with it. Enjoy the video.

C400 SSD Benchmark Results—Yeah, It’s Fast

Ben Thiel — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 22:31:41 +0000

Several of you have been asking to see additional benchmark results from the C400. Micron’s product engineering teams tailor their performance testing suites to OEM requirements, which focus on IOMeter and PCMark® Vantage data.

But we know most of you are interested in seeing a wide variety of tests. Our Crucial team runs many of the tests popular with reviewers, and I’ve included screen shots from AS SSD, ATTO, and CrystalDiskMark for the Crucial m4 SSD (the consumer version of the C400 OEM drive). Enjoy. You can see why we believe the C400 and m4 will be one of the most compelling client SSD designs of the year; great performance, leading 25nm NAND, and Micron’s thorough quality and reliability testing. More in-depth performance tests will be available from all your favorite reviewers in a couple weeks.

AS SSD

ATTO

CrystalDiskMark

C400 Delivers Remarkable Performance

Justin Sykes — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 17:30:40 +0000

It’s true, the RealSSD™ C400 delivers some pretty impressive performance (415 MB/s reads and 260 MB/s writes). But all those IOPs and sequential performance specs are over the head of most consumers. To speak to them, we set up this simple demo of a C400 and stock hard drive running the same programs in identical laptops.

Of course the demo itself isn’t a novel concept by any means, but we think you’ll agree that results are staggering.

AS Benchmarks for RealSSD C300

Justin Sykes — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:28:51 +0000

We received a couple requests to show the AS benchmark results for the new drive. So we asked Todd to provide a couple screen shots of the results–and here they are.

Of course, our immediate goal is to get these in the hands of independent reviewers. You should see third-party tests coming out in the next month or so as we ramp to production and get drives sent out. Stay tuned–we’ll call out results both here and through our @RealSSD Twitter feed.

AS SSD Benchmark: 3G Empty

AS SSD Benchmark: 6G Empty

You asked for it: RealSSD C300 random IOPs

Justin Sykes — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:40:57 +0000

A lot of people are excited about the C300 demos we posted last week, and a number of you asked to see the random read/write IOPs numbers for the new drives. So I’ve asked one of our Apps guys, Todd, to shoot a video of the C300 running through the Iometer test. These are 4K transfers on 100% random read/write tests with a queue depth of 32.

We’re using the same Intel Core2Duo system, equipped with our 256GB RealSSD C300 drive and a 6 Gb/s SATA host bus adapter. We also test it at SATA 3 Gb/s to show how it will perform in those systems. I think you’re going to like the results.

RealSSD C300 goes head-to-head with a hard drive in everyday tasks

Justin Sykes — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:46:24 +0000

By now you’ve seen our SSD vs SSD benchmarks, but to show you how that speed translates to the real world, we pitted our 256GB C300 SSD against a standard issue 7200rpm HDD in identical systems. We then tackled a handful of everyday tasks—boot up, file copy, and opening large files in Adobe® Photoshop®.

System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
OS: Windows® 7 Pro 64-b

Benchmarking the World’s Fastest Client SSD

Justin Sykes — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:32:09 +0000

Our new RealSSD C300 outperforms every client SSD currently available on the market. To prove it, we ran a few standard benchmarking tools (PCMark Vantage’s disk suite and the classic disk benchmark ATTO) on identical systems. The only difference: a 256GB Micron RealSSD C300 in one system and the leading competitor’s 160GB SSD in the other.

System Details
MoBo: Intel® X48 chipset based
Processor: Intel Core2Duo E8500
Memory: Micron® 2GB DDR3 1066 (PC3-8500)
Drive Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (via Marvel HBA)