16 GB DDR3 DIMMs Showcased by Intel at IDF

As previously mentioned, yesterday was the last day of Intel's Developer Forum event, which has held in San Francisco at the Moscone Center. During the three-day conference, the Santa Clara-based leading chip maker released a number of details on its in-development projects, while also demoing a couple of the soon-to-be released products, like the Calpella notebook platform. Aside from its own products and technologies, the company also displayed a couple of products that are meant to be part of the next-generation computing technology.

While most computer users only benefit from a maximum of 1GB of system memory, during the IDF event, Intel showcased 16GB RAM memory sticks. Developed by Hynix, these high-capacity memory sticks use technology from MetaRAM in order to stack all individual DRAMs onto them.

"As a leader in DRAM technology, Hynix is pleased to be working with MetaRAM and Intel to successfully develop the world's first 16GB DDR3 module," said Senior Vice President of Marketing at Hynix Semiconductor, Mr. J.B. Kim. "With this product introduction we expect to see growth in high performance, high density applications." he added.

"Hynix has always been at the leading edge of memory innovation and it immediately understood how our new DDR3 MetaRAM technology could improve customers' overall compute performance by increasing the memory capacity and frequency," said Fred Weber, the CEO of MetaRAM. "We've seen good market traction with our DDR2 MetaSDRAM chipset. We believe that the adoption into Intel-based servers and workstations as well as the memory bandwidth benefits of DDR3 MetaRAM will garner even more momentum for our chipsets and technology."

Intel representatives showed off the memory inside a number crunching server, built using 10 of these sticks for a total memory of 160GB - this, in a context in which some computer users get to benefit from that amount of space on their hard drives. The server was running on two of the company's upcoming Nehalem EP processors, which will use triple channel DDR3 memory.