Archive for June 24th, 2008

I was at a conference this morning where Spansion and Virident were presenting their latest flash memory technology designed to replace DRAM in web servers. Some interesting facts:

1. Cooling and power distribution losses account for 50% of the electricity consumed in US datacenters.
2. Datacenter power use doubled from 2000 to 2005 and will almost double again by 2010. Growth in electricity use has been slowed somewhat by the advent of server virtualization over the last few years.
3. US datacenters use more electricity than countries like Sweden and Iran
4. Datacenters use almost 100 billion kilowatt hours each year at approximately $0.10 per kilowatt hour. Datacenter electricity consumption is growing at 15% per year (!)
5. Datacenter memory (DRAM) uses 2x more electricity than the total capacity of US solar panel installations.
6. US, EU and Japan use 3/4 of the world’s electricity.

It will be interesting to see whether Spansion’s newly announced EcoRAM can put a dent in these problems. They are citing some impressive numbers:

1. 1/5th the power of DRAM at comparable read performance.
2. 800x faster than NAND flash access times.
3. 30 mins to write 1TB of data on EcoRAM vs 5 hours using traditional NOR DIMM’s.

On the other hand, the representatives from Intel and AMD certainly weren’t giving their unqualified support to EcoRAM.