On the face of it, it sounds utterly daft to use NOR flash for data storage. The cell is too large and the read speed too slow. But this is exactly what Spansion is proposing.
By packaging its NOR flash DIMMs with some software from a start-up company called Virident, Spansion says it can all but match the read speed of DRAM, which is normally three times faster than NOR.
And though the NOR cell is much larger, it does, of course, allow two bits per cell storage rather than the one bit per cell of DRAM. This, says Spansion, makes the bit-per-cell-size pretty much the same for NOR as for DRAM.
So, Hey Presto, the possibility of using NOR instead of DRAM for the initial access on a server, becomes a theoretical possibility.
From then on it all gets better. "At the device level the energy consumption is eight times less", says Spansion's John Nation.
That means that eight NOR die in a stacked package could use the same power as a single DRAM die while delivering eight times the storage capacity.
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Spansion and Virident say server farms can get the same capacity from one server using their NOR-based memory as four servers using DRAM.
With servers taking 128GBytes of DRAM each, the installation rate of servers growing exponentially, and Green-ery rampant, Spansion could be on a winner.
Spansion's 32GB DIMMS using 65nm 2GBit chips are for sale now, but density should double next year when 4Gbit chips, made on 45nm, are used.
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