MetaRAM to introduce High Memory at a low Cost

A Silicon Valley-based start-up led by prominent semiconductor innovators claims to be able to bring down the cost of high-performance computers by as much as 90 percent by a breakthrough in memory technology.

MetaRAM, founded by Fred Weber, who was formerly the chief technology officer at AMD, is all set to unveil its MetaSDRAM, which incorporates technology that doubles the memory on a memory stick by using cheaper memory components.

Colfax International would be able to use the chipsets to introduce a new high-performance computer at a price of $45,000 that the company says would have earlier cost more than $500,000.

The prices of memory sticks increase manifolds with the memory. Weber, who is sometimes described as the ‘father’ of the successful AMD Opteron microprocessor, revealed that this is so because the higher capacity memory sticks use higher density DRAM chips, which cost more to make and have a higher failure rate.

So the ruling chips in the market are those with 1 GB of memory since they can be made at a low cost in large numbers while the 2GB chips are much more expensive.

"There's not nearly as much competition in the two gigabit space because it's so expensive and very few vendors can make them. So it has a high price and high mark up," Weber said. "So our solution was to take one gigabit DRAM, which sells for two bucks, and allow people to use that standard DRAM to build much bigger DIMMs than they normally could."

It occurred to him that memory had become "the biggest bottleneck in systems" and that left AMD in search of a solution.

MetaRAM's development instantly quadruples computer memory. The chipset does this by organizing and maximizing the function of "off-the-shelf" memory chips from different companies as Micron, Samsung, Toshiba and others.

Large databases should be able to immediately absorb the technology. Moreover, "it's another step in making personal supercomputers possible," Weber said.