Loren Shalinsky, a Strategic Development Director at Rambus, recently penned an article for Semiconductor Engineering that explores how server market growth has prompted a salient increase in memory demand.
“A high-end server can have 48 or more DIMM slots, providing nearly 200x the memory capacity as a standard PC. A server not only requires more memory, but also higher bandwidth memory,” he explained.
“The industry is currently transitioning to DDR4 memory, which will eventually lead to speeds that are 50% higher than the older, DDR3 memory, and with improved power efficiency.”
According to Shalinsky, the explosion of information being generated and processed in Big Data applications – such as real-time analytics, virtualization and in-memory databases – is staggering and it has only just begun.
“These massive amounts of data will continue to put pressure on data center and enterprise servers for more bandwidth and capacity,” he said.
“The combination of these trends will continue to fuel growth for both servers and memory, painting a future outlook that is anything but bleak.”
As we’ve previously discussed on Rambus Press, DDR4 will continue to ramp on the server before finding its way into desktop PCs, laptops, and consumer applications like digital TVs and set-top boxes.
Concurrently, the cost of DDR4 will steadily decrease, ultimately reaching price parity with DDR3 when it will become the de-facto choice for consumer products.
As Shalinsky told us in June, DDR3 memory has been the workhorse for main memory since 2009.
“It’s had a good run, but the industry is poised to let its successors take over,” he added.
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