A Japanese memory startup that’s been lurking in the shadows for over a decade has just emerged with a bang. Neo Semiconductor has announced that it wants to produce DRAM chips 8 times denser than the current generation – 16 Gbit DRAM – using a technology called 3D X-DRAM.
As the name suggests, there will be layers of material, 230 in total so far, helping it produce a 128Gb DRAM chip. By comparison, Samsung is aiming to launch a 32Gb DDR5 DRAM chip in 2023 with 1TB memory modules on the horizon.
According to data revealed by the company’s co-founder and CEO, Andy Hsu, the first prototypes should land next year if talks to license the technology to DRAM manufacturers (Micron, Samsung Semi, SK Hynix, Kingston Technology) come to fruition.
Like 3D NAND, 3D X-DRAM is expected to allow memory densities to increase exponentially to 1TB before 2024. By comparison, it has taken the industry more than a decade to the DRAM to upgrade from 4GB memory chips to 16GB, a small improvement in comparison.
Cheaper and denser
Memory modules are relatively cheap at the low end of the spectrum and become excruciatingly expensive at the high end. A single 256 GB DDR4 server RAM module, the maximum memory size on the market, costs around $2,500 (or $10 per GB). By comparison, you can get 32GB of RAM for less than $60 (or less than $2 per GB).
Neo’s technology solution could reduce the cost of memory as dramatically as 3D NAND did for solid-state storage; imagine 256 GB of RAM at $60. What makes it even more appealing is that it uses existing fabrication techniques to achieve the layering, similar to 3D NAND.
This comes at a time when server manufacturers are finding it very difficult to add more memory slots to their server motherboards, forcing them to adopt exotic solutions like CXL expansion cards. 3D X-DRAM would also help solve this problem by increasing memory density.
Popular applications such as machine learning or AI (think ChatGPT) who use LLM (Large language models) require access to very large pools of memory and this comes at a significant cost, both financially and in terms of power/latency.
The RAM drive
While I don’t expect it to reach end users anytime soon, it has the potential to change the memory storage pyramid like Intel 3D XPoint (AKA Optane) failed to establish itself as a candidate level between system memory and SSD.
For end users, since system storage has plateaued (most laptops come with 256GB of built-in storage these days), we can expect to see RAM-only devices in a distant future. A paradigm shift that could change the global computing landscape and how modern operating systems work.
Without the need for a “slow” SSD and access to a single pool of blazing fast system memory, applications would be faster and potentially more secure. After all, VPN providers as NordVPN Or ExpressVPN deployed RAM only servers which load a new system image after each reboot.