MetaRAM Quadruples DIMM Capacity

A tiny company backed by big names and money claims it has developed technology to fit 8GB of RAM onto a single DIMM.

The claims of MetaRAM, a start-up offering its first big announcement on Monday, sound a bit like something you might hear from a late-night infomercial: The company claims it has quadrupled the amount of RAM that can fit on a single DIMM, bringing that number from 2GB all the way to 8GB. They say it will cut the cost of adding memory to servers by 90 percent, and best of all, that the product is right around the corner. But unlike all those other infomercial promises, as near as anyone can tell, MetaRAM isn’t bluffing.

The company has big names behind it, and has good explanations for what it’s been able to do. MetaRAM is the brainchild of Fred Weber, a former chief technology officer of AMD for a decade, and Suresh Rajan, a former Nvidia executive. It’s also funded by money from som of Sun Microsystems’ founders.

MetaRAM claims it has enabled the huge leap in storage capacity by using a sort of 3D stacking technique to maximize how much memory fits aboard the chip, then using a proprietary controller to trick the host computer into thinking it’s an ordinary memory module. The result: existing servers will be able to swap out existing RAM for MetaSDRAM without additional expense or other upgrades.

Since large servers can require massive banks of RAM to function, MetaRAM hopes its technology will drastically cut the cost of providing that much RAM by allowing less-specialized hardware to handle it and  offering four times more storage in a package far less expensive than four individual DIMMS.

While MetaRAM products aren’t currently available, the company has deals with manufacturers Smart Modular Technologies and Hynix to get the modules into production, and they could be showing up in servers by the end of the first quarter of 2008.