AMD Licenses Embedded Memory From ISi

Mathew Everett 26 Jan, 2006 at 5:43pm ET Article published in Tech

Innovative Silicon (ISi), the developer of Z-RAM (Zero Capacitor DRAM) high density memory, has announced that AMD has contracted to purchase a Z-RAM embedded memory technology license for potential use in its future microprocessor products.

What does this licensing mean for AMD? Well with this new Technology AMD will be able to increase the size of their embedded memory. This will yield faster chips, and less overall power consumption.

We are very pleased to announce that AMD has contracted to purchase a technology license for our Z-RAM embedded memory technology. We are proud to have such a prominent and successful technology company with a strong reputation for innovation select Z-RAM memory, and underline the validity of the Z-RAM approach in comparison with other, less proven technologies. Working with AMD shows the increasing importance of using ultra-high density embedded memory in the semiconductor industry as embedded memory occupies larger and larger proportions of the microprocessor and embedded processor die area

It will be interesting to see what comes of this. Will this technology help out AMD’s newly mentioned Quad Core CPU’s? or was this licensing a result of AMD using similar copyrighted material? I guess only time will tell.

Source: Business Wire

Comments

26 Jan 2006 ~ 6:09pm lemonlime Interesting.. perhaps we'll start seeing much larger L1/L2 cache sizes from AMD.
26 Jan 2006 ~ 6:34pm RWB AMD is going from awsome to..... awsomer!
26 Jan 2006 ~ 7:14pm GrayFox Gah it just d-ram .

This will rase the price and yeild little proformence increese.
26 Jan 2006 ~ 8:10pm Qeldroma Couple this news with this news and Articles Like These ... a picture might develope?

Personally, I think AMD, lagging behind in process and frequency with Intel, is looking in the rearview mirror and seeing that it's marketshare is currently heavily dependent on getting more bang/cycle than Intel as it can. I find the prospects ... actually intriguing and possibly exciting.
26 Jan 2006 ~ 11:21pm this just keeps getting better, a bigger cache would actually give a notable increase in performance, and you give each core that big cache and you have one rockin processor.
26 Jan 2006 ~ 11:22pm alright shorty, whats the deal, how come it wont ever put my username in their when i type. does it not like me?
26 Jan 2006 ~ 11:22pm this is airborn by the way.
28 Jan 2006 ~ 12:51am GrayFox This isn't cache its a variation of d-ram (the ram thats in those slots on your motherboard)
28 Jan 2006 ~ 11:42am but they are putting it right on the die, right? so this could be considered a cache could it not? since it would be available to the processor right there?
28 Jan 2006 ~ 4:29pm muddocktor The Z-Ram will give AMD the ability to either keep the same amount of cache size and reduce the die size, yeilding more processors per wafer or increase the amount of cache size while keeping the processor die size the same, Airborn. So AMD can either increase profits or increase IPC of their processor offerings with this integrated into future processors. I imagine it will take a few years before this is fully integrated into their processor designs though.
29 Jan 2006 ~ 2:11pm GrayFox

wrote:

but they are putting it right on the die, right? so this could be considered a cache could it not? since it would be available to the processor right there?

Cache is fast d-ram is slow.