Spansion, the NOR flash manufacturer, has come up with a Mirrorbit NOR flash memory for servers, dubbed EcoRAM, which it claims can substantially cut the amount of energy used in Internet data centres.
According to Spansion, combined with Virident Systems' GreenGateway technology, its new memory, called EcoRAM, can help slash energy consumption by up to 75 per cent and offer four times the memory capacity of traditional DRAM-only servers for the same energy consumption.
"With Spansion EcoRAM and Virident's GreenGateway, we have the potential to cut the world's energy consumption in Internet data centre servers by up to 75 percent and reduce the total cost of ownership for Internet companies," said Bertrand Cambou, Spansion president and CEO.
"The application of MirrorBit technology to the Internet server market is a critical milestone in our move to extend the applicability of this technology beyond the traditional NOR Flash memory segment."
Spansion claims that the read speed of EcoRAM "meets the requirements for fast random access" while the write speed is "two to ten times greater" than NOR write speed.
Spansion claims that EcoRAM has 1/8th the energy consumption of DRAM and 10x the reliability of DRAM. EcoRAM is claimed to have two to four times greater density than conventional floating gate NOR
Spansion and Virident say they have re-architected the memory subsystem so it can use four times more memory without increasing power consumption, or the same amount of memory with a quarter of the power.
With EcoRAM enabling eight times more capacity per DIMM, four conventional DRAM-based servers could be replaced with one Spansion EcoRAM-based server.
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