In two years, Advanced Micro Devices is planning to increase the memory on its Opteron microprocessor platform with a new memory extender that will increase the number of dual in-line memory modules that each CPU uses, the company announced July 25.
When the Sunnyvale, Calif., company's Socket G3 Memory Extender, or G3MX, technology hits the market in 2009, it promises to increase the number of DIMMs that can be used with each core from eight to 16.
In addition, the G3MX technology and the DIMMs, which are currently being co-developed with IDT and Inphi, a pair of integrated circuit companies, will also support the newer DDR3 DRAM (double-data rate 3 dynamic RAM) standards, according to AMD.
The result of this technology, according to AMD, will be an increase in the memory capacity of high-end and some midrange servers. The technology will also allow these systems to deliver increased performance when running mission-critical applications or large databases, or when used for virtualization.
While the amount of memory that comes with 64-bit processors is quite large, there are limitations in the number of DIMMs servers can fit due to the design of the chip set and the motherboard. This development by AMD addresses those design limitations and allows servers to run with much larger memory capacity.
Read the rest of this eWEEK story: "AMD Looks to Increase System Memory"