Servers + Storage | Max's memory In the past, a lot of the growth in the memory market was driven by the consumer sector - since operating systems were massively hungry for RAM but capacities weren’t high, and upgrades were frequent. But their memory demands seem to have stabilized around 8GB - so now memory vendors are all about data centers. “That’s where capacity growth is going,” said Pasi Siukonen, Technical Resources Group team leader at Kingston. “Typical desktop or laptop users, when they are following their OS recommendations, we have seen from Windows 7 to 8 to 10, that there’s not a lot of memory requirement on the OS side, it’s the same on MacOS and Linux. “So we see a lot more of the memory investment on the server side.” By the way, those fancy AI applications
that everybody is talking about? They love to munch on memory. Sanjay Mehrota, CEO of massive memory-maker Micron, recently told analysts that AI servers need six times more DRAM than servers for traditional workloads. “On the RAM side, we can see 128GB space per module, and soon it will be 268GB per module. Imagine the capacities we can reach,” Viaud said. “DDR5 starts at 3.2GHz; latencies are going to go up as frequency goes up, voltage goes down to 1.1V - DDR4 was 1.35V overclock or 1.2V standard voltage.”
Absolutely fabless The interesting fact about Kingston is that even though the company made $6.7bn in 2017, the last year for which there’s available data - it does not manufacture its own memory chips.
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Instead, it focuses on customization and assembly across eight manufacturing plants with 60 surface mount technology (SMT) lines, rumored to be churning out more than twenty-five million memory modules every month. In a world where silicon has become a commodity, being fabless makes sense: Nvidia, Qualcomm, Xilinx and AMD, which all went fabless, can all attest to that, having moved to fabless operations years ago. “You have to remember, if you look at the DRAM landscape in the nineties, there were like 20 DRAM vendors. There was Toshiba, Qimonda, Elpida. There’s four left now because it’s such a dangerous market to go in. And this is why they probably made a wise decision to not get involved in manufacturing of wafers.” Viaud said.