Setting
the scene for DIMM wars
The DRAM market's new clothes had long been
invisible.
But the SSD market was too preoccupied with lower hanging
storage fruit.
Now the secret is out and the effect of DIMM wars will
brutal and swift and erode decades of collective wisdom about the shape of
next generation memory. |
latency loving
reasons for fading out DRAM | | |
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SSD
news the
SSD bookmarks SSD
controller news DRAM
news in SSD context flash
and nvm news in SSD context after AFAs -
whats the new flash box? introducing
Memory Defined Software are we ready for
infinitely faster RAM? |
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SSD market
history |
2003 - terabyte SSDs become
commercially available
2007 - Fusion-io launched the ioDrive - a PCIe
SSD
2008 - over 100 companies design SSDs
2010 - SSD market
revenue exceeds $1 billion
2011 - year of Fusion-io's IPO
2012
- adaptive DSP ECC flash offered by over 10 companies
2013 - memory
channel SSDs pose competitive challenge to PCIe
2014 - in-situ SSD
processing promises new roles for SSDs
industry momentum grows for
rethinking DRAM architecture
2015 - SCM SSD DIMM wars market exceeeds
10 companies
2016 - memory efficiency and speed redefined by coding
from Symbolic IO
2017 - DRAM and flash shortages make alternative nvms
look better
2018 - memory accelerators don't have to look like
memories | | |
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big idea #3
retiring
and retiering enterprise DRAM
which includes a new
value
proposition for enterprise flash SSDs (flash as RAM) and presages a
rebalancing of server memories - DRAM will shrink as a percentage of the
physical RAM - which will also make it easier for emerging alternative memory
types to be adopted by hardware architects and by systems software too. |
What were the big
SSD ideas of 2015? | | |
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Who's got all the answers
to help understand how all the changes in the SSD market are coming together?
The answer is - no one and everyone and you too.
|
the SSD
Bookmarks | | |
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With the ratification of
the NVMf specification in June 2016, flash devices such as SSDs and storage
arrays can now communicate over RDMA networks (such as RoCE or InfiniBand),
delivering the same high performance, low latency benefits as local attached
NVMe. |
what were
the big SSD ideas which emerged in 2016? | | |
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Why can't SSD's true
believers agree on a single shared vision for the future of solid state
storage? |
the SSD Heresies | | |
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Companies like Xitore and
Netlist have been saying they want to get into the "flash as RAM in the
DIMM form factor" market for a while now.
I haven't seen details from these expected competitors but my guess is
that - unlike Diablo's product - which leverages the DRAM which is already in
other DIMM sockets in the same motherboard - that some of the later contestants
in this market will take the approach of placing everything needed to provide
transparent emulation and caching into a single DIMM.
That alternative approach might work better for smaller scale embedded
systems which don't have a lot of DIMMs - but creates difficult design
constraints - because the "all in a single DIMM" approach means there
will be less flexibility about RAM flash cache ratios. |
controllernomics and
user risk reward with big memory "flash as RAM" | | |
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"...Application-unaware
design of memory controllers, and in particular memory scheduling algorithms,
leads to uncontrolled interference of applications in the memory system" |
Are you ready to
rethink RAM? | | |