Responding to customer and industry demand for increasingly improved system memory capabilities and choice, AMD (NYSE:AMD) today announced it collaborated with leading integrated circuit (IC) companies to develop the Socket G3 Memory Extender (G3MX) technology, which is planned for the AMD Opteron™ processor platform infrastructure ecosystem in 2009. This innovative platform-level technology is designed to extend the total memory footprint in future AMD Opteron processor-based systems and, therefore, enable increased performance to customers’ enterprise-class servers, such as those used for databases and emerging technologies like virtualization and multi-core computing. Supporting the DDR3 memory specification from JEDEC, G3MX technology is being developed in collaboration with IDT and Inphi, who are planning to sell G3MX components as part of their power- and cost-effective device portfolios supporting the memory industry.

“AMD’s competitive edge lies with responding to our customers’ requirements now and in the future,” said Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server/Workstation Division, AMD. “As we look ahead to pervasive quad-core and octal-core server computing, AMD is committed to delivering the flexibility and choice our customers desire to successfully deploy virtualization and multi-core environments. True to our collaborative nature, we worked closely with memory technology experts to develop G3MX, as an easy, cost-effective way for customers to attain faster access to memory or additional memory to enable increased performance for complex and emerging applications and environments.”

“AMD and its platform partners have developed an innovative technology that directly addresses the need for efficient and cost-effective memory capability, which is one of the most significant computing requirements of the scientific community,” said Thomas Zacharia, associate laboratory director of Computing and Computational Sciences, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “The extended platform memory capabilities expected via AMD's upcoming G3MX memory technology should allow the use of bigger memory capacities with industry-standard DIMMs for large workloads to ultimately help to advance scientific research and discovery.”

To create G3MX technology, AMD worked closely with the memory technology community to address the complex issues vexing customers today. With G3MX, AMD can enable a DDR3-based means of increasing total memory in a server system for ultimate flexibility.

“G3MX technology opens new opportunities and options for IDT to continue the company’s leadership in advanced memory interface solutions,” said Jimmy Lee, senior vice president and general manager for the IDT timing solutions group. “By establishing an easy and affordable way to increase the total memory footprint, AMD has again established itself as a valuable partner in the industry.”

“AMD’s customer-centric innovations continue to prove time and again why AMD is one of our most strategic technology partners,” said Young K. Sohn, president and CEO, Inphi Corporation. “G3MX can unlock the memory mystery of running high-performing enterprise-class server applications in environments such as virtualization and multi-core computing. By addressing this issue, we can provide our customers with solutions that support their critical business needs.”

Availability

G3MX is expected to be available in 2009 when AMD introduces its next-generation architecture enhancements.