(iTers News) - Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. unveiled a fifth generation of green memory solutions that include 128gigabit DDR4 DRAM chips, PCIe SSD, and 3D V-NAND flash memory chips.

At the Memory Solution Forum 2013 held in Seoul yesterday, the world’s largest memory chip maker demonstrated how these advanced memory chip solutions can combine to help dramatically improve data server computers’ performances, while reducing power consumption and heat. .

“Our new 5th generation memory solutions marks a technology breakaway from the past, shedding new lights on data center server market,” said  Young-hyun Jun, executive vice president of memory sales and marketing, Samsung Electronics. 

3D V-NAND at the core 

If the DDR4 and PCIe SSD green memory solutions are embedded together in a server computer, according to Samsung, the combination will dramatically improve the performance of server systems approximately 1.6 times and quadruple system capacity by eliminating unnecessary data duplication in the enterprise storage systems.

In addition, the green memory combo can help save power consumption by a factor of 45 terawatts per hour.

A close look at each of these solutions can help explain how they make it to the big gains in power budget and performance.

For one thing, the new generation of the 20nm-class 128Gb DDR4 DRAM chips boasts a far wider bandwidth of transferring 2,133 megabits of data per second between a CPU and memory system,  breaking the industry’s long-held ceiling of 1,866 Mbps data transfer speed.

Its technology breakthrough does’t stop there. It comes built a error-correction circuitry, which detect  errors happened in the data transfer and correct them.

The 5th generation of the green PCIe SSD comes built with new technology innovations, too. At the core of the 2.5-inch 126Gb green PCIe SSD is Samsung’s new breed of 3D V-NAND flash memory chip that vertically stacks layer over layer of channels, control gates and floating gates in an up to 24 layered 3D cylindrical form.

Compared with a 20nm-class conventional planar NAND flash memory chip, the 3D V-NAND flash memory chip boast a 2 times faster data write speed, consuming half the power, even if it fabricated with a 30nm-class technology. By stacking layers over layers of silicon gates in a 3D cylinder, the chip maker can pack more of memory cells into a given space that it does it with a conventional planar structure, laying the groundwork for breaking through current technological limits, as the industry faces toughest ever challenge in shrinking below a 20nm geometry. 

Works with New generation Haswell   

It boasts ten times durability, too, making far less vulnerable to deterioration in the reliability, which is caused by repeated operations of data read and write, compared with a planar-structured NAND flash memory chip.

The green PCIe SSD also comes with an advanced ultra-low power microcontroller and PCIe v.3.0 or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express version 3 interface technology. Today’s SATA SSD uses a PCH buffer chip to interface with a CPU, often getting caught in a data transfer bottleneck, as tones of data contend for faster access to a CPU.

Using the PCIe interface technology, the green SSD comes to make a direct connection with a CPU, reducing data latency by 83%, It also boasts a 4GB/s data transfer bandwidth, a whopping 567% improvement over today’s mainstream SATA technology of which data transfer bandwidth hit a wall of 600MB/s.

All combined, the PCIe SSD comes to improve energy efficiency by 145%.            

The huge gains combined in the performance of the PCIe SSD and DDR4 DRAM chips translate into massive benefits for data center. Imagine you operate a data center that runs 10,000 server computers with a total investment cost of US$32 million for simultaneous access of up to 4,000 users. If you retool it with a new generation servers incorporating Samsung’s PCIe SSD and DDR4 DRAM chips, you can recalibrate it with only 7,880 servers for the same investment costs, seeing big cuts in the power consumption from 2610 kilowatts to 2310 kilowatts. But, its performance would improve so dramatically that it can accommodate simultaneous access of up to 1,000 users.

The 2.5-ich PCIe SSD comes in three versions of 400GB, 800GB and 1,600GB, mainly targeting data center server computer markets.

Mass-production of the green memory solutions has already begun, including DDR4 DRAM chips and PCIe SSD.  Samples of the solutions are also being shipped for 2014 rollout of server systems.