Intel has already said goodbye to the business with DRAM, NAND flash and most recently 3D XPoint. Nevertheless, the company wants to research a new memory technology on behalf of the US Department of Energy that works much faster than DRAM. The memory is supposed to accelerate the simulation of nuclear weapons.
Storage research for the energy authority
As reported by The Register, Intel was commissioned by the US Department of Energy and its research branch, Sandia National Laboratories, to develop a new memory technology as part of the Advanced Memory Technology Program (AMT). This is primarily intended to accelerate supercomputers for simulating nuclear weapons and their effects. Therefore, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) provides the financial framework. In addition to Sandia, other US research institutions are also involved in the multi-year project.
Sandia Labs' announcement states that it has already identified several storage technologies that “have the potential to deliver more than 40x the application performance of our upcoming NNSA exascale systems.”
Technical details are not yet known, but Intel says that they want to “reconsider fundamental aspects of how DRAM is organized and coupled with computing platforms” in order to “create a groundbreaking achieve performance”.
The aim is that the new technology is used not only for the nuclear program, but for all areas of high-performance computing. “We hope that these innovations will be translated into industry standards to improve the entire ecosystem,” Intel Fellow Josh Fryman is quoted as saying. However, the communication with simulations for hypersonic missiles again mentions a potential weapon segment as an example.
Intel memory isn't commercial
Intel as a research partner initially seems surprising given the company's many failed attempts in the memory business. Intel had already said goodbye to the DRAM business in 1984. The non-volatile mass storage device NAND flash and the associated SSD business were sold to SK Hynix last year. And it was only this summer that Intel also said goodbye to the Optane products based on the 3D XPoint phase change memory, as this division was making high losses. Intel had previously developed and produced 3D NAND and 3D XPoint together with its research partner Micron, but the two have long since gone their separate ways. At first glance, Micron would appear to be a much better contact for the US project, because the manufacturer continues to earn its money with DRAM and NAND flash.
Intel pioneered DRAM
However, it must not be forgotten that Intel was the pioneer in the development of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM). The first commercially available DRAM chip was the Intel 1103 with 1 KiBit storage capacity. The IBM researcher Robert H. Dennard is considered to be the inventor of the DRAM memory cell.
The fact that Intel no longer produces and sells memory products does not mean that research into new technologies in this segment is not ongoing. When it comes to particularly fast DRAM memory, Intel recently equipped processors with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). But even its performance is far from sufficient to meet the project's requirements.
SOT-MRAM is faster than DRAM
Bridging the gap between extremely fast SRAM with tiny bit densities and correspondingly high costs and slower DRAM has long been sought. A recent hot candidate is SOT-MRAM (Spin Orbit Transfer Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory), which is being developed by the French company Antaios. However, it is still completely unknown in which technical direction Intel is researching as part of the project.
Comparison of current and future storage technologies (Image: Enlong Liu)