The NVM Express Work Group has decided to incorporate itself to further the NVM Express (NVMe) specification for accessing solid-state disks (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe) bus. NVMe is a standardized register interface, command, and feature set for PCIe-based storage technologies such as SSDs, designed specifically for non-volatile memory. It is optimized for high performance and low latency, scaling from client to enterprise segments. Read Full Article.
EE Times: Samsung Pushes DDR3 Design & Manufacturing to New Efficiencies [Portfolio]
As DDR4 awaits widespread adoption and new technologies such as hybrid memory cube continue to be fleshed out, there remains opportunity to improve on DDR3’s performance, and more importantly, its design and manufacturing. Last week, Samsung announced it was mass producing what the company said is the most advanced 4Gb DDR3 memory based on a new 20 nanometer process technology using immersion ArF lithography. Read Full Article.
EE Times: Research Labs Push the Bleeding Edge of Shared Memory Systems [Portfolio]
While businesses turn to proven systems for their high-performance computing needs, research institutions are more willing to experiment and take a chance on the latest and greatest to solve complex problems. The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) is the perfect example: It recently selected SGI’s large-scale shared memory system, the UV 2000, for installation at its Earth Simulator supercomputer center. Read Full Article.
EE Times: DDR4 Heir-Apparent Makes Progress [Portfolio]
The Hybrid Memory Cube Consortium (HMCC) is making steady progress on bringing one of the most discussed heirs to DDR4 closer to reality by releasing an update to the HMC specification late last month. The first draft of the second-generation specification supports increased data rates that advance short-reach (SR) performance from 10 Gbit/s, 12.5 Gbit/s, and 15 Gbit/s, up to 30 Gbit/s. Read Full Article.
RONNIEE Card Shares Memory Across Networks [Portfolio]
Startup A3Cube recently announced a new network interface card, dubbed RONNIEE Express, designed to eliminate the I/O performance gap between CPU power and data access performance for datacenters, big data, and high-performance computing applications. The company said that by turning PCI Express into an intelligent network fabric, it can exceed existing networking technologies such as Ethernet, InfiniBand, and Fibre Channel, and improve memory latencies. Read my full story on EE Times.
As Backwards as the B in ABBA
There are a few musicians and bands I keep coming back to as the years go on, and ABBA is always one of them.
ABBA is the first “grown up” musical act I was allowed to listen to as a kid (I’m not yet 40), and I actually discovered the super group in a rather backwards fashion. ABBA Greatest Hits Vol. 2 was the first vinyl I owned that wasn’t a children’s album, and by then ABBA’s penultimate studio album, Super Trouper, had been released. Together with Voulez Vous, released in 1979, these three records formed my view of what ABBA was, and without the Internet, it took me a while to work back and understand the history and evolution of the Swedish pop quartet, which was close to dissolving by the time I’d become a fan. Continue reading →
Reading Comic Books… Err, Graphic Novels for Credit
With ballroom dancing on indefinite hold, I needed something to get me out of the house, and by chance I came across a U of T continuing education course “Words and Pictures: Appreciating the Graphic Novel.”
Leave it to me to find a university level course that allows me to read comic books for credit. Tonight is the third session of 10, and we will be discussing Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller. It’s the most mainstream and only superhero book on the reading list, which is actually quite dense. Continue reading →
EE Times Roundup: Next Generation Memory [Portfolio]
There are a number of next generation memory technologies on the horizon that hold great promise to meet the evolving needs of consumer devices and enterprise storage systems and applications. Some have been in development for a number of years, and are close to a critical turning point that will see them widely adopted. Here’s a few that merit watching in the next year, including several DRAM alternatives. Read my full article on EE Times.
Deduplication & Compression Extend SSD Lifespans [Portfolio]
NEWARK, Calif. – The higher costs of SSDs (relative to spinning disks) and their lifespan limitations generally keep enterprises from fully embracing them for storage. The ongoing challenge is how to optimize them to get the best bang for the buck, while also addressing the endurance problem. Read the full article on EE Times.
Group Forms to Drive NVDIMM Adoption [Portfolio]
SAN JOSE, Calif. — The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has created a special interest group to foster the adoption of nonvolatile DIMM (NVDIMM), which it sees as the early days of computing architectures that combine storage and memory as a single entity. Read my full article on EE Times.