News WD announces Ultrastar Memory Extension Drive range

bit-tech · 13 Nov 2018

Acts as Optane-like DRAM expansion.
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edzieba · 13 Nov 2018

According to WD's Chris Marsh, the secret to the surprisingly minimal performance impact comes less from the flash memory components themselves and more from the smarts added to them: 'Near-DRAM performance is achieved through the use of 20+ types of algorithms to predict, prefetch, and optimise memory and locality, as opposed to the typical single algorithm that is typically implemented in hardware (e.g., adjacent cacheline prefetch),' Marsh claims. 'It uses machine learning, pattern recognition, code scanning, and other techniques, which allows the Ultrastar DC ME200 to massively prefetch addresses that the CPU will be using thousands of cycles ahead, so by the time the CPU needs those addresses, they already are waiting in DRAM.'
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With all the issues the CPU world is waking up to with 'smart' prefetching, this just screams "exploitable!".

Anfield · 13 Nov 2018

edzieba said: ↑

With all the issues the CPU world is waking up to with 'smart' prefetching, this just screams "exploitable!".
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And the cherry on top:

It uses machine learning, pattern recognition, code scanning, and other techniques
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It will learn to exploit itself