X-bit labs

AMD Unveils Rival for Intel’s FB-DIMM.

Category: Memory

by Anton Shilov

[ 07/25/2007 | 08:14 AM ]

Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday unveiled a new technology that would enable next-generations of servers to utilize massive memory capacities, something, which will substantially boost server performance. Besides AMD, IDT and Inphi, some of Intel’s FB-DIMM backers, also participate in development.

The new technology currently called Socket G3 Memory Extender (G3MX) is a part of AMD Opteron platform infrastructure due to be unveiled in 2009. The G3MX will support DDR3 SDRAM and will extend the total memory footprint in future AMD Opteron processor-based systems. Even though G3MX is designed in a way similar to Intel’s FB-DIMM, it uses industry-standard memory modules and is a typical memory extender akin to those used by such companies as IBM and HP. It is unclear, however, whether the technology supports mirroring, hot-plug and other capabilities for high-end servers.

As processors become multi-core and support features like virtualization, they need massive amounts of memory to work efficiently. The G3MX is designed to help that.

“AMD’s competitive edge lies with responding to our customers’ requirements now and in the future. As we look ahead to pervasive quad-core and octal-core server computing, AMD is committed to delivering the flexibility and choice our customers desire to successfully deploy virtualization and multi-core environments,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, server/workstation division, AMD.

G3MX technology is being developed in collaboration with IDT and Inphi, who are planning to sell G3MX components as part of their power- and cost-effective device portfolios supporting the memory industry.

“True to our collaborative nature, we worked closely with memory technology experts to develop G3MX, as an easy, cost-effective way for customers to attain faster access to memory or additional memory to enable increased performance for complex and emerging applications and environments,” Mr. Allen added.

“AMD and its platform partners have developed an innovative technology that directly addresses the need for efficient and cost-effective memory capability, which is one of the most significant computing requirements of the scientific community,” said Thomas Zacharia, associate laboratory director of Computing and Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “The extended platform memory capabilities expected via AMD's upcoming G3MX memory technology should allow the use of bigger memory capacities with industry-standard DIMMs for large workloads to ultimately help to advance scientific research and discovery.”

G3MX is expected to be available in 2009 when AMD introduces its next-generation architecture enhancements.