AMD Fiddles Violin for 504 GB of Memory per System

AMD and memory producer Violin Memory are working closely on what can be called Opteron servers stuffed with memory. Complains about lack of memory creating bottlenecks have become an international sport. Well, on the opposite, what would happen if users had plenty of RAM and they could not find any use for it anymore? AMD and Violin are in such a position and they are walking hand in hand for achieving interconnectivity between huge DRAM appliances and Opteron-based servers.

Violin has plans to integrate their technology into the servers using AMD's HyperTransport. "The cache coherency protocol of Hypertransport technology will enable several processors to share extensive memory resources from one or more Violin Memory Appliances. This extended memory model will enable these servers to support much larger datasets", the companies said in a press release.

This field called Memory-Attached-Storage (MAS) and allows customers to create memory modules, and then link them as they would do with RAID configurations. Violin is currently selling a Violin 1010 memory unit to feature 2U boxes. Each box can hold up to 540GB of RAM and, should this not suffice, the customer can go ahead and fill the other for 1 TB of memory. Each of these units can support up to 84 virtual memory modules.

Nothing should amaze us when it comes to alternative storage media. We had Flash memory, then we had NAND solid state-drives working with single-level NAND, then multi-level cell NAND storage, now it's time for a fashionable DRAM alternative. This is an extremely expensive solution, but it has its obvious advantages, such as lower power consumption and higher performance.

"An AMD Opteron processor-based server connected to a HyperTransport technology-enabled Violin Memory Appliance will have both directly connected memory and Extended Memory resources. Directly connected memory can be selected for bandwidth and latency while the Extended Memory can be much larger and located in the Memory Appliance. Applications such as large databases will benefit from the large-scale memory footprints enabled through Extended Memory."