by Anton Shilov
10/16/2013 | 11:10 PM
In a bid to decrease power consumption of their products, large server makers are currently concentrating on developing low-power micro-servers or even create new concepts that share common resources (storage, power, cooling, etc.) between numerous processing nodes. However, by how much is it possible to cut power consumption of traditional servers by utilizing new technologies? According to Samsung, quite significantly.
Under a “New Memory Paradigm” theme, Samsung this week introduced advanced memory solutions optimized especially for next generation data centers that use cloud computing based on a big data platform. This type of infrastructure is rapidly increasing in support of the mobile computing industry. The newly presented fifth generation green memory solutions will help to resolve key data center issues by achieving dramatic performance improvements, securing additional physical space for systems, and saving large amounts of power.
The new green memory solutions from Samsung are DDR4 memory made using 20nm process technology as well as Green PCIe solid state drive from Samsung.
The Green DDR4 memory provides effective data rate of 2133Mb/s, 15% faster than effective DDR3 frequency of 1866MHz amid 24% reduction in power consumption. DDR4 consumes less power than DDR3 thanks to 1.05V – 1.2V voltage of DDR4 compared to 1.2V – 1.35V – 1.5V voltages of DDR3. Samsung’s next-generation DDR4 products will be able to eventually offer data transfer speed of 3200Mb/s, 1.5 times faster than today’s DDR4 enterprise products.
Samsung’s new green PCIe SSD offers a data transfer speed of 4GB/s, which is six times faster than 600MB/s SATA SSD’s, while reducing the delay in data transfer by 67%. These performance upgrades increase the level of energy efficiency by approximately 2.6 times. Samsung plans to introduce other next-generation PCIe SSDs, based on its new 3D V-NAND technology and a new proprietary NAND controller, at a later date.
A combination of Samsung’s DDR4 and green PCIe SSD will enhance the performance of server systems approximately 1.6 times and quadruple system capacity by eliminating unnecessary data duplication in the tiered enterprise storage systems.
According to Samsung, if all server systems adopted Samsung’s fifth generation green memory solutions, an anticipated power savings of 45 terawatts per hour could be achieved. This translates into six billion people saving the power needed for everyday smartphone use for two years, which is equivalent to planting 800 million 10-year-old trees.