This year at DAC, Marc Greenberg gave a presentation on the near- and medium-term future of DRAM in the ChipEstimate booth. Two separate technology paths will dominate: the PC/server space and the mobile space. By 2015, PCs and servers will be using three (or more) channels of DDR3 or DDR4 SDRAM and mobile devices will have migrated to LPDDR2, LPDDR3, and Wide I/O formats.
Processors in both of these spaces will actually consist of multiple heterogeneous and homogeneous processing elements all vying for SDRAM access, a situation that places many demands on the SDRAM controller. For example, just by reordering traffic to the SDRAM(s), the DRAM controller can improve memory bandwidth by 30%. At the same time, these newer SDRAMs have low-power modes that can be used to advantage by the controller.
For these insights and more, watch the video:
