DRAM turns to liquid cooling - for the moment

Kingston Technology has demonstrated what happens when power consumption begins to spiral out of control. The company has launched heatspreaders for memory modules that are fitted with pipes for wat... for those people who like to have the fastest possible PC for gaming.

Water cooling is one of those things that, outside the mainframe business, pops its head up every once in a while. Some parallel-processing machines introduced liquid-cooled heat pipes in the early 1990s. Apple had a go at water cooling its top-end G5 PowerPC-based machines in the middle of the past decade. Now it’s the turn of memory to get the water treatment. It’s not because the memory arrays are running that much faster, but the demands of the bus interface when used in the highest-speed machines.

For Steve Leibson at the Denali Memory Blog – who pointed out the good sides of DDR3 the other week when memory interface speeds are not being pushed – the move to improve cooling is a sign of how the the DRAM interface has to change. Possible contenders include variants of the low-voltage differential signalling (LVDS) protocols or the Mobile XDR interface that Rambus wants to license to memory makers.

As water cooling never lasts long in the market, a change in interface looks more likely.

Posted by Chris Edwards

The Low-Power Design Blog is sponsored by Mentor Graphics. The company has focused years of R&D on low-power design techniques and is glad to support a resource that highlights creative methods for reducing the power consumption of electronic systems.