AMD has seen its Instinct GPUs continue to gain traction in an increasingly competitive marketplace as it continues to take data center market share from new and existing players and make gains with gaming-centric CPUs in the consumer market.
Its recent acquisition of MEXT, an AI-centric startup currently deploying software that allows users to treat NAND flash as DRAM at the operating system level.
AMD says Santa Clara-based MEXT is a “pioneer in AI-powered memory optimization technology.”
SSD storage to DRAM for data centers?
The idea MEXT is building on is hardly a new one, but one it appears to have refined considerably, 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 stored in DRAM, while offloading “cold” or less frequently accessed sections to SSDs.
This allows for a far lower performance offset than using all of one’s flash memory as DRAM, the latter being an order of magnitude faster for access, although speed is becoming a driving factor for newer chips that are increasingly memory-bound.
There’s also an important economic factor at play here: DRAM is nearly 50 times more expensive than the equivalent NAND flash, making cost and scalability important considerations for most data centers looking to avoid an already expensive DRAM market that will only get worse over time.
The move itself isn’t AMD’s first foray into the storage segment, with its consumer-focused StoreMi offering essentially allowing a faster SSD to act as a cache, offsetting slower drives on one’s system by essentially creating a copy of files that need to be regularly loaded or accessed 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 on existing system memory. although enthusiasts have copied the idea on AMD’s ultra-fast 3D V-Cache technology.
AMD’s purchase makes sense given how deeply embedded its hardware is expected to be in data centers over the next decade, and one could argue that MEXT’s team, which offers expertise in AI infrastructure and memory systems, could be a much more valuable acquisition than the underlying technology it offers.
AI and chip talent have become increasingly difficult to lock down, with companies scrambling to attract some of the biggest names in both segments, and MEXT’s acquisition could help both AMD’s short-term and long-term goals in the data center segment.
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