Improving Your Memory

We can't remember a time with so many different kinds of RAM to choose from. Here's your field guide to the new chips and what they do.

Russell Kay, Technical Editor

It used to be simple. You always wanted more memory in your computer, but you had to worry about only one kind--DRAM. The only important differences were in per-chip capacity. While the first IBM PCs in 1981 used 16-Kb chips, today's chips sport 16 Mb. Capacities up to 1 Gb have been announced, but those chips won't ship for a few years.

Memory technologies are so diverse that you can't tell the players without a scorecard. BYTE examines 17 new types of memory chips that embody not trivial distinctions but substantial differences: built-in caches, synchronization, specialized graphics processing, on-chip ALUs, and more. Add in ne w forms of packaging, and it's hard to keep tabs on what's what.

In "Fast, Smart RAM," Peter Wayner sorts out current and cutting-edge memory technologies. He looks at memory architectures, chips optimized for graphics and video applications, and supercomputer memory. Wayner considers which types of RAM will likely prevail in the marketplace and what will be in your next PC. Related text boxes consider why memory prices stopped falling a few years ago, the reasons flash RAM is here to stay, how the new RAMs affect future cache use and design, and why we're going to see several different types of RAM in a single computer.

"More Memory in Less Space" examines the trend to stacking memory wafers in layers, achieving densities as high as 2 GB per cubic inch. Rick Cook examines the evolution of commodity memory from DIPs to SIMMs and discusses why DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules) will be the norm for the next few years.

Finally, it's worth noting that the memory industry has produced remark ably little in the way of standard-setting activity. It's becoming evident that the marketplace, not an IEEE or ANSI standards committee, will decide which memory chips become the mainstays of tomorrow's computers. This is a two-edged reality. On the one hand, it's fostering the current explosion of exciting new memory technologies; on the other hand, the marketplace is likely to remain fragmented for some time to come. But if we have to choose between encouraging new advances in technology and achieving a more stable commodity market, BYTE thinks it makes sense, especially over the long haul, to bet on ideas, imagination, and innovation.