TSV-based 3D DRAM tech heads to production. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2013/04/03/hmc-spec/1
And where, pray tell, do I claim it does? Samsung, Micron and Hynix have all committed to producing HMC hardware commercially. That makes a product, patronising Jedi.
I am glad to see the future is looking good. So for fast memory for the mass, will be great for gamers alike.
I can see the potential in these advances, but say it was to become available this year, how will our real experiences be improved? Will we see those 10x benefits? Would there be something in our machines to cripple that increase in memory speeds? Asking as a gamer, rather than folder
Hopefully, one of the manufacturers will re-implement an architecture utilized by Silicon Graphics in the 1990s; where the memory <i>was itself</i> the system buss, thereby having a throughput latency of near-zero. All components connected to each-other through the "memory buss". I'm very excited to see if this prospect comes about with "3D" memory technology like this!
It might not be immediately evident, but you WILL see a difference. RAM access is a HUGE bottleneck right now, just because RAM runs so much slower than the processor. It's why processors have large internal caches, and why cache misses are so devastating to performance. Interestingly, in the dawn of time back in the 70s and 80s, RAM was far faster than processors. To the extent that some processor designs designated a portion of RAM to use as CPU registers because there was no speed penalty to it and you could implement an arbitrarily large number of registers that way.
Now this I like the sound of. So, what are the odds something like this might become practical once the 2.0 or 3.0 spec comes along? I don't see processors getting hugely faster, and I have to wonder if Intel can keep the pace of ever-increasing IPC up... At any rate, it's things like this that sort of make me hope I live to be 100, just to see what the tech landscape looks like (assuming I'm in any sort of shape to comprehend it by then.)
I heard that by the time we're a hundred, we'll have moved to socket type LB (Lamby Bridge), whereby the vat-cloned brains of lambs will be wired directly to the motherboards. System memory and processor on one chip (or chop, at least). Cooling will be provided by a small child with a palm frond. Obviously, at that time, they will be back to working on miniaturisation.
If I were to venture a guess, I'd say we could see this tech in the supercomputer market in 2-5 years. The performance benefits will be substantial, especially in environments where large amounts of data is being processed with poor locality, requiring the repeated loading of data sets from memory. The impacts in the consumer market may be a bit more muted, as engineers have worked hard on caching strategies over the years to try and take memory performance out of the equation whenever possible. I think the biggest contribution this has to make for the consumer market will be higher memory density in SSD's. I know this spec is for volatile memory, and therefore not applicable to SSD's, but the refining of 3D circuit printing tech will surely spill over to other sectors in time.