My i-RAM article is live. It's a lot later than expected, but I had to wait for a few more responses from Gigabyte in Taiwan before putting it live.
The i-RAM we reviewed is the shipping version of the card, which differs in a few ways from what we talked about at Computex. The biggest difference? The i-RAM will retail for $150, not $50 as mentioned at Computex. A big part of the price difference is the initial 1K run of the product; if Gigabyte ramped up production significantly, and transitioned away from using a FPGA to a custom IC for the board, that cost could be brought down significantly. But they'd have to ship a lot of i-RAM boards to justify producing their own IC for these things, and they won't ship a lot without a lower price, and so on and so forth.
The card is pretty cool, honestly the one thing that floors me every time is how quickly you can copy files around on it. I know it's just RAM and it's actually slow as far as memory-to-memory copies, but in Windows all you see is a drive letter, and copying at ~100MB/s is just something I'm not used to on a normal computer.
I'm not sure what I'd do with an i-RAM in my personal system, but if I could fit 8GB or more on one (or RAID two together) then I start having a few ideas of what I could do.
The i-RAM we reviewed is the shipping version of the card, which differs in a few ways from what we talked about at Computex. The biggest difference? The i-RAM will retail for $150, not $50 as mentioned at Computex. A big part of the price difference is the initial 1K run of the product; if Gigabyte ramped up production significantly, and transitioned away from using a FPGA to a custom IC for the board, that cost could be brought down significantly. But they'd have to ship a lot of i-RAM boards to justify producing their own IC for these things, and they won't ship a lot without a lower price, and so on and so forth.
The card is pretty cool, honestly the one thing that floors me every time is how quickly you can copy files around on it. I know it's just RAM and it's actually slow as far as memory-to-memory copies, but in Windows all you see is a drive letter, and copying at ~100MB/s is just something I'm not used to on a normal computer.
I'm not sure what I'd do with an i-RAM in my personal system, but if I could fit 8GB or more on one (or RAID two together) then I start having a few ideas of what I could do.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
27 Comments
View All Comments
notposting - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
is broken.Gage8 - Wednesday, July 27, 2005 - link
not broken, just the wrong link. This takes you to the weblog page instead of the articleBoboSama - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I don't think the cheap 1GB sticks are that far off. I was browsing eBay and it seems that you can get DDR266/DDR333 1GB sticks for about $60 shipped; very reasonable IMO. If you combine shipping, you can have 4GBs worth of storage for just over $200. And since the RAM only runs at 200mhz anyway, it doesn't really matter if you get DDR266 or anything above that. I think I might get one of these bad boys if they run a special or a promotion for <$100.aggie02 - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
THIS COMMENT SYSTEM SUCKS! Please Anand, change it back. It takes me twice as long to read the comments now. Can't afford to read on the job. Please do something!!!!!!!George Powell - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I have to say I think it is very good.From what I have seen thus far the commments seem to be much better and more constructive than with the old system.
Back to the main topic.
I think this sort of technology is very promising. Not in a general user system at the moment but for enthusiast systems where users demand the very best performance I think it will do very well.
I myself would almost certainly be in the market for one of these if it supported 300MB/s transfer and had an 8GB capacity. If Gigabyte or indeed any other manufacturer made a device that could acheive this then I reckon the performance on tap would be even more impressive.
aggie02 - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
you do have a point, i haven't seen any First Posts or Russian jokes, but still, I would like to see the comments on the same page as the news. I usually open all the news subjects on a separate tab, so if there are 10 news articles i would have 10 tabs open and now 10 popups for the comments. that is ridiculous.SeventhCycle - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I wonder how much faster this would have been helped by1) Supporting memory that's actually running at DDR400 or DDR500
2) Having Sata II support.
3) Putting a 128 bit interface on there (like current motherboards do)
I get the feeling that most of the performance bottleneck comes from SATA's implementation hardly ever reaching theoretical, but I bet the other two would help performance, too.
Finally, this is one of those devices that's <b>begging</b> to be put on 1 lane PCI express.
bunnyfubbles - Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - link
I also wonder how faster memory might help, but then there's the possibility its SATA interface would bottleneck it making the faster memory no better than if its running 200MHz DDR. SATA II might help there, but we'd need both. Again we also run into problems with the dual channel 128bit interface if SATA is too slow for it. Obviously you'd think it'd be a lot easier to get the memory running @ 400MHz oppposed to 200MHz instead of 128bit interface, which generally provides much less performance boost than doubling your memory speed.One thing that really makes me wonder is RAIDing some of these bad boys together. Not only do you solve some of the capacity problems, you also have a chance to increase speed in certain cases. Although doubling the i-RAM is also going to double the already steep entry price. I guess unless you have a ton of 512MB sticks lying around (as 1GB aren't exactly as common), it might be more worth it but with two i-RAMs you're already pushing a grand.
It is very intriguing.
Future revs and prehaps competition from other companies could make things even more interesting and far more realistic even (ie $50 per card if not less). Good news is the DDR1 prices seem to be steadily falling, especially for 1GB modules - they're actually a reasonable option now (not outrageously expensive as they were only months ago) for an upgrade, and I'm definately considering getting a pair to upgrade my system. It might not be long before they're only $50 a pop for cheapie stuff that you'd definately not mind having run @ a mere 200MHz.
Although even still, in such an "ideal" situation, the total cost would be $250 or so for a mere 4GB SSD. $500 for 8GB in RAID-0. Raptors seem like a bargain in comparison.
The niche might be its biggest role. Completely silent systems such as HTPC setups would definately be and ideal situation for the i-RAM.
Even if nothing really big comes directly from this, it is definately a step in the right direction in pushing solutions for faster storage devices that aren't insanely expensive.
Although it does make you wonder how cheap memory manufactures could produce super high capacity DDR200 for specific roles such as this. Usually the slower memory fades away because it becomes very poor for modern system memory performance. You definatey do not want DDR200 when you can have DDR500, and memory manufacturers aren't going to want to produce it with no demand. However if there was that demand they could probably produce it for cheap.
I know its just dream talk, but it'd be great if a future version supported more than 1GB sticks and we had memory manufacturers pumping out cheap DDR200 at high capacity (2GB or even more)
Malikot - Tuesday, August 16, 2005 - link
I see a lot of room for improvement on this little device. There's a lot to be gained here.DDR 200 or DDR 400 will perform precisely the same. Check the bandwidth on this table (http://www.acme.com/build_a_pc/bandwidth.html)">http://www.acme.com/build_a_pc/bandwidth.html) to see that BOTH DDR 200 and DDR 400 saturate the SATA bus... (1.6Gbps and 3.2Gbps). Both standards run on the usual 64bit bus width. SATA (I) width is 1.5Gbps. SATA II is 3.0Gbps. So if you actually moved onto SATA II you'd gain a lot from i-RAM and DDR 400, and lose a lot using DDR 200.
Where are the REAL applications for this? Like someone said: scratch disk! BUT also if people worry about the power issue... think servers. all sorts of servers would benefit from iRAM. I can imagine that server farms would also benefit a lot. I can see the workstation market coming up with special iRAM-totting solutions.
A 2nd generation of these things could effectively benefit from using not 1 but 2 SATA controllers onboard (there are tons of add-in cards available on the market that already sport 2 SATA controllers onboard). This would effectively create a dual iRAM card with a 3.0Gbps threshold (but still no point in using DDR400 there, as you'd actually be doing "dual channel DDR200") - RAID Zeroed of course.
SATA-II chips are here but the hard-drives suck big time, you're not getting a proportional increase in performance (double the bandwidth ISN'T double the data transfer) BUT if you actually use iRAM with SATA-II controllers you could actually double the iRAM performance and take it waaayyy beyond the ability of any harddrive today. 300MB/s plus the possibility of RAIDing, which would take it to 600MB/s... SCSI could finally Rest in Peace.
Unfortunately GIGABYTE shot itself in the foot: for 150 bucks a pop, plus the cost of RAM you can go with current top of the range RAPTOR's, raided together and get almost identical performance for half the price. Gigabyte screwed up big time on pricing, imho. Greedy buggers.
Actually, coming back to that Microsoft thingie... why the heck aren't we reintroducing things like L3 Cache in the middle of the SATA interfaces? That way we could actually do those hybrid drives.
robaroncape - Friday, December 14, 2007 - link
BAD DEALS FOR BAD MEMORY ON EBAYPlease read my guide about the I-ram, high density ram and Bzboys. If you are looking for high density ram for your I-ram you must read this. It will save you alot of money,time and headaches.
This is the fight to hve them removed from ebay.
Thanks, Rob
http://reviews.ebay.com/BAD-DEALS-FOR-BAD-MEMORY-O...">http://reviews.ebay.com/BAD-DEALS-FOR-B...MORY-ON-...