AMD has seen its Instinct GPUs continue to gain traction in an increasingly competitive market, as it continues to take data center market share from new and existing players and makes gains with gaming-focused CPUs in the consumer market.
Its most recent acquisition of MEXT, an AI-focused startup currently deploying software that allows users to treat NAND flash memory as DRAM at the operating system level.
AMD says Santa Clara-based MEXT is “a pioneer in AI-powered memory optimization technology.”
SSD to DRAM storage for data centers?
The idea behind MEXT is not new, but it appears to have been considerably refined, making it an important acquisition at a time when hyperscalers continue to struggle with limited DRAM availability, even as an even worse SSD crisis appears to be on the horizon.
MEXT’s predictive memory is essentially a tiering engine that monitors which pages of memory applications tend to access, treating regularly accessed sections as “hot” working sets held in DRAM while offloading “cold” or less frequently accessed sections to SSDs.
This allows for a much smaller performance trade-off than using all flash memory as DRAM, with the latter being an order of magnitude faster for access, even as speed becomes a determining factor for newer chips that are increasingly memory-limited.
There’s also a major economic factor at play here: DRAM is nearly 50 times more expensive than corresponding NAND flash memory, making cost and scalability key considerations for most data centers looking to avoid an already expensive DRAM market that’s set to get worse over time.
The move itself is not AMD’s first foray into the storage segment, as its consumer-focused StoreMi offering essentially allows a faster SSD to function as a cache, compensating for slower drives in the system by essentially creating a copy of files that need to be loaded or accessed regularly on the fastest possible storage solution.
Its lesser-known (and since abandoned) Radeon RAMdisk offering allows users to do the exact opposite of what MEXT offers: create a very fast virtual disk in existing system memory. even as enthusiasts have replicated the idea in AMD’s ultra-fast 3D V-Cache technology.
AMD’s purchase makes sense given how deeply integrated its hardware is expected to be in data centers over the next decade, and one could argue that the MEXT team, which offers expertise in AI infrastructure and memory systems, could be a much more valuable acquisition than the underlying technology it offers.
It has become increasingly difficult to attract AI and chip talent, and companies are splashing out money to attract some of the biggest names in both segments, and the MEXT acquisition could help AMD’s short- and long-term goals in the data center segment.
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