Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

E-COMMUNITY TO ADVANCE KEY MEMORY TECHNOLOGIES

More than a dozen leading companies, including Dell and HP, have joined Intel Corp in establishing the Memory Implementers Forum, a new on-line community focused on advancing key memory technologies such as DDRII and Fully Buffered-DIMM (FB-DIMM). These memory technologies help improve power efficiency and performance.

The Memory Implementers Forum will serve as a central community for member companies to share plans, technical documents, marketing collateral and up-to-date news. A catalog will feature the latest products and technologies from across the industry as well as contact information for each member. Any company that develops memory-related products or systems using memory can join the Memory Implementers Forum at no cost with the completion of a legal agreement.

"As Moore's Law continues to drive ever-increasing processing power, the memory subsystem must keep pace with performance enhancements," said Pete MacWilliams, Intel senior fellow of the Desktop Products Group. "The Memory Implementers Forum creates a community for discussion of opportunities and challenges across memory technologies. With the volume ramp of DDRII-enabled platforms in 2004 and the introduction of FB-DIMM interconnect technology in 2005, the Memory Implementers Forum is expected to provide a tool for successful memory technology transitions."

"Advancing standards-based memory technology is critical to delivering more scalable and balanced performance on Dell systems deployed in the enterprise," said Darrel Ward, senior manager of product planning for the Dell Product Group. "This industry forum is an important vehicle to drive better memory technologies for customers, such as DDR-2 that will ship in Dell's next generation of servers."

"As a leader in technology development, HP is co-sponsoring the Memory Implementers Forum to help enable smooth transitions to next generation memory technologies," said Dwight Barron, HP fellow of Industry Standards Servers. "We look forward to working with the industry in deploying DDR2 and future memory technologies in HP ProLiant* servers and using the Forum as a resource for memory industry discussion of next generation technology implementations."

The two primary technologies of initial focus in the Forum are DDR2 and FB-DIMM. DDR2 represents the next wave in memory with memory vendors planning product introductions to support 2004 platforms. Many DDR2 modules from across the industry have already been validated on Intel architecture client and server platforms.

FB-DIMM is a new memory interconnect technology standard for high-end memory connections. FB-DIMM transitions the memory channel to a serial interface and replaces the DIMM register with a memory buffer. FB-DIMM connections are expected to enable systems to scale the number of memory channels available to a server system. Implementations of FB-DIMM enabled DDR2 memory are expected in future Intel architecture-based platforms.

The companies that have joined the Memory Implementers Forum so far include ATP Electronics, Buffalo Technology, Corsair Memory Corp, Denali Software Inc, Elpida Memory Inc, Hynix Semiconductor Inc, IDT Corp, Infineon Corp, Kingston Technology Inc, Micron Technology Inc, Nanya Technology Corp, Samsung Corp and WinTec Industries Inc.

For more information about the Memory Implementers Forum, visit www.memforum.org.