What many IT managers don’t realize is the extent to which memory can impact the overall energy envelope – particularly with virtualization and cloud computing infrastructures.

Samsung’s 40nm class, 2Gb, 1.35V DDR3 offers one of the most advanced, scalable memory solutions for new server architectures today. Providing an approximate 73% saving in power compared to conventional DRAM (DDR2), Samsung Green DDR3 memory is fast becoming the a widely adopted low-power solution for data centers.

We’ve seen that dramatic power savings at the module level can translate into an overall system power improvement ranging from a 38% higher power savings to as high as 50% in some applications. This not only makes a huge dent in the TCO for servers, but also helps to significantly curb data center CO2 emissions.

Samsung 40nm class, 2Gb, 1.35V DDR3 and its 100GB Enterprise SSD have been optimized to be fully compatible with both the AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processor, which is the industry’s first 8-core and 12-core x86 processor for high-volume 2P and 4P servers, and the just announced AMD Opteron 4100 Series processor, which is highly energy-efficient and designed for cloud and hyperscale server applications.  Together with the newest AMD Opteron processors, Samsung Green DDR3 and Green SSD work to provide the user an extremely compelling, performance-enhancing server infrastructure for today’s large data centers, as well as SMB.

On the storage side, Samsung SSDs use up to 60 percent less power than the hard disk drives commonly found in data centers today.  Also in terms of IOPS, a high speed SSD does its job 41 times faster than an enterprise HDD according to our studies, accessing up to 80 times more IOPS than a typical 15K rpm HDD. Also, Samsung SSDs can access up to nearly 250 times more IOPS per watt than a traditional 15K rpm HDD.  Moreover, a single SSD can replace many HDDs for optimal space utilization.  In some high-performance enterprise applications, a single SSD can replace anywhere from 4 to 40 HDDs, due to the SSDs performance advantages.

The path to continuous optimization does not stop here. Our newest low-voltage DDR3 – a 4Gb chip – will further push power savings down by as much as 83%.  We are gearing up for volume 4Gb production to accommodate expected deployments for the new AMD Opteron 4000 Series platform. Higher density Samsung Green SSDs are also expected shortly.  For more information, please go to www.Samsung.com/DDR3 or www.Samsung.com/SSD

Sylvie Kadivar is the director of Strategic DRAM Marketing at Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Samsung Electronics states that the data points provided in this blog are the result of specific measurements made in actual testing conducted by Samsung in 2009.

Just this past week, we saw that there is still a lot of volatility in the memory market, and memory is a commodity that has a huge impact on the price of a server.

For instance, taking a quick look at Crucial (http://www.crucial.com) shows that in comparing the prices of 2GB and 4GB DIMMs, there is still a pretty substantial premium on DDR-3.

(pricing for single DIMM SKUs, as of 7/09/09 at http://www.crucial.com)

For customers buying servers, memory is often the most expensive part of the system. With four and eight DIMMs per socket, you can easily see the price differential rocket upward as the system requirements grow.

Where desktops generally use 2GB of memory or 4GB for more power users (Windows Vista 32-bit only sees about 3GB), in the server space we are talking about 16GB as the minimal point of entry and 32GB as a common configuration.  Couple this with the more expensive registered, ECC memory that servers demand, and you can start to feel the pain in your budget.

By utilizing the energy-efficient DDR-2 memory, AMD Opteron^TM processor-based platforms can take advantage of the economies of scale as they grow the memory capacity on their servers to meet the needs of the business.

Next year, when the DDR-3 memory prices for server memory have likely started to drop out of the stratosphere and down into a reasonable range, we’re planning for our Q1 2010 platform, codenamed “Maranello”, to go to market with support for DDR-3 memory.  And, more importantly, low voltage DDR-3 memory.  The low voltage offerings, along with these anticipated lower prices, should make DDR-3 the smart choice for server customers.

So, while the cost of migrating a desktop from DDR-2 to DDR-3 is becoming reasonable for many customers, we still have a long way to go before DDR-3 has similar economic advantages for the server market.

John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.