Did you know that a single human genome sequence constitutes an approximate 140-gigabyte data file? Not surprisingly, it took 10 years and $3 billion to completely map the first human genome. Fortunately, as Datanami’s Alex Woodie confirms, the medical establishment has come a long way since its big genomics breakthrough in 2003.
Memory + Interfaces
Server market growth tied to increased memory demand
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.
PC World packs 128GB of DDR4 – into a single PC
PC World executive editor Gordon Mah Ung recently announced that his team successfully “smashed right through” the traditional 64GB system RAM barrier. “[The] barrier has vexed consumer computing for years now. Mainstream desktop PCs have all featured four slots for a maximum of 32GB of DDR3 RAM,” he explained.
The evolution of SSDs in the Enterprise
When Solid State Storage Devices (SSDs) first appeared on the market in the early 1990s, industry pundits were unsure as to when the flash-based devices would be capable of competing with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). Known for their reliability, low-cost and consistent performance, HDDs have always managed to push back on SSD encroachment. However, the SSD-HDD paradigm has changed in recent years, especially for Enterprise-class storage. This is primarily due to increased SSD performance and efficiency (higher IOPS, lower latency, etc.), both of which are made possible by high-speed interfaces such as SATA 3.0 SAS 2 and PCIe-based NVMe.
Report: Intel Skylake Xeons could feature 28 cores, 6 memory channels
ExtremeTech’s Joe Hruska recently analyzed a set of leaked slides that suggest Intel’s plans for its upcoming Xeon cores may “stretch farther into the stratosphere” than originally predicted. “[The] new data purports to show Intel’s roadmap for 2015 and beyond, stretching all the way to 28 cores and 6 memory channels per CPU,” he explained.
Report: Intel’s Skylake-S is primed for DDR4
Writing for KitGuru, Anton Shilov says Intel’s upcoming Skylake-S architecture will promote DDR4 “considerably more aggressively” than initially believed. “Although [the] integrated memory controller of Skylake supports different types of DRAM, the processors will not officially support DDR3, but will only be compatible with a low-power version of the technology,” he explained.
