EcoRAM to cut server farm energy bills?

Spansion announced at the end of 2007 that it was teaming up to develop new memory solutions which held the prospect of lower energy consumption. According to Florian Bauch, Spansion’s EMEA sales manager: “This announcement follows on from that. It’s a new memory innovation which expands memory capacity and reduces energy consumption.” Bauch quoted recent reports from Dr Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, claiming data centres are a rapidly growing consumer of electricity. In 2005, data centre energy consumption exceeded 150billion kWh, with the US and Europe responsible for about two thirds of this. “That’s more than the electricity consumed in a year by Sweden. If energy consumption doubles by 2010, data centres will be consuming as much power as Italy,” Bauch added. EcoRAM is based on Spansion’s MirrorBit Eclipse technology, taking advantage of Eclipse’s fast read and write speeds. According to Spansion, the technology enables eight times more capacity per DIMM, allowing four conventional dram based servers to be replaced with one EcoRAM based device. EcoRAM will be produced on 300mm wafers using a 65nm process at SP1, Spansion’s fab in Aizu-Wakamatsu and will be available later this year.