I did not expect attending MemCon last week would be the impetus to drag me ‘kicking-and-screaming’ into the social networking age. While I struggled with Twitter being a natural part of my daily routine, my resistance seemed to somehow be an admission that I am getting older (which I don’t mind admitting). But as a ‘high tech marketing professional’ I want to understand these “killer apps” first hand and how it will drive much of the semiconductor and software development activities over the next few years. Jim Elliot, VP of Memory Marketing at Samsung, talked in his keynote address about these killer apps, and he also admitted his first tweet was that morning in preparation for his keynote. Not to be outdone, I took out my Blackberry Storm and composed my debut tweet for the masses – adding my two cents to the world out there. It was a little bit of a rush and then I waited…nothing happened. I felt anxious so I tweeted again to make sure I wasn’t talking to myself, and suddenly…someone else from the same conference was following me and I followed him. Pretty cool (I think). The resistance was over … for now.
Of course, the importance of all this to the memory industry is the increased server usage along with the increasing size of memory in mobile devices. The PC and high-performance servers are the leading products driving the need to convert from DDR2 to DDR3 memory, and the mobile devices market is driving the requirements for low-power DDR. Here are some quick stats from the Keynote: 20% of the daily internet use is driven by social networking sites, Facebook is now the Number 3 Internet site with 100M users/day with 30M of these users being mobile. Twitter use has increased 7x from December ‘08 to April ‘09 with 32M unique visits. This is good news for driving hardware sales in an industry that has not had too much good news this year—with a 10% decrease in memory revenue, reduced PC sales (-3%) for the first time since the dotcom bust and cell phone unit volume is down 8%. The two bright spots, however, are the smart phone segment (13% growth in ‘09) and the Netbooks (AKA MIDs or Smartbooks) which are driving the LPDDR sales.
According to Samsung, <5% of the DDR market volume in 2008 was DDR3 with expected growth up to 35% of the market in 2009. The advantage to the server market of using DDR3 is a significant reduction in the number of servers needed to maintain the same performance, providing lower cost and lower power (electric bills, in this case). The primary advantage to the PC market is improved performance with lower power (battery) due to faster memory access (memory is on less time). All this discussion about faster memory access dovetailed nicely with Sonics recent announcement last week of its combined DDR controller with advanced memory scheduler supporting both DDR2 and DDR3 memories. Adding DDR3 to a system increases its performance but risks lowering overall access efficiency. So having a good memory scheduler is critical to maximize the DDR3 upgrade.
Needless to say, there was a lot of additional information from this Keynote and the conference that bears mention, but in the spirit of my newfound Twitter skills and forced pithiness, MemCon can be summed in less than 140 characters: More performance = lower power consumption and lower cost. One attendee said that it should have been called ‘Low-Power Con.’ Let me know what you think….You can follow me on Twitter @fferrosonics, or, of course, send me a ‘DM’.
Tags: conference, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, denali, latency, low-power, LPDDR, memcon, memory, performance, samsung, sonics, transition, twitter