The SPMT Consortium reached another milestone today. We are pleased to welcome Marvell into the SPMT Promoter group. The promoter group makes up the governing body of the Consortium and is ultimately responsible for approving any specifications released to the members. According to Dr. Sehat Sutardja, chairman, president and CEO of Marvell, he has been investigating serial DRAM for quite some time and believes that Serial Port Memory Technology is the way of the future. I couldn’t agree with him more. When you take a look at the cadre of future memory interface architectures being bandied about in the industry today, nothing comes close to Serial Port Memory Technology in meeting the industry requirements in terms of high bandwidth, low power, low pin count, and low latency. Dr. Sutardja, who is recognized as one of the foremost experts on memory and is also an expert in analog design, says that the future for serial DRAM is now. He stated that the mission is to bring this technology to the industry as a standard. From the beginning, that has been the goal of the SPMT Consortium and we are glad that Marvell along with Samsung, Hynix, LG, ARM, and Silicon Image share the same belief. But, as they say on the 2:00 am infomercials (sometime I suffer from insomnia) " But wait, there’s more!":

We are also announcing a new and very exciting enhancement to the SPMT specification which is available to SPMT Consortium members as of today. We are introducing SerialSwitch technology. This is a game changer. It brings together the best of both worlds into a single memory interface. SerialSwitch enables systems to take advantage of the low power capabilities of parallel memory when low bandwidth is required and when the system demands high performance and high-bandwidth, SerialSwitch technology automatically switches the memory into high bandwidth mode, up to 6.4GB/s, while maintaining the low power benefit of SPMT. Additionally, the architecture allows for plug-in replacement of LPDDR2 memories so that the SoC developer doesn’t have to choose between parallel and serial at the time of the development. Because the SoC is designed for LPDDR2 and SPMT-enabled memory, this gives flexibility to the system designer as well to choose the appropriate memory device, either LPDDR2 or SPMT memory, based on price, availability, and system requirements but using the same SPMT-enabled SoC; as I said, the best of both worlds.

These are exciting times for the Consortium. The response from memory, SoC, and system designers has been incredibly positive. We have been reviewing this enhancement with industry leaders for several months and all say that the technology hits the nail on the head.

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I guess I’m a member of the “old school” when it comes to storing personal data in “The Cloud.” This cloud thing has been around since the 1990’s first fostered by Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems. I scoffed at the idea then because I couldn’t imagine anyone storing personal information on some remote server in a cavernous warehouse in some god- knows-where location. What would happen if something went wrong with the server or the database program? What would happen if someone hacked into the server and stole the information? It was just too risky for me; not that I have anything that anyone would want to steal. To this day, I still can’t get my head wrapped around the notion of storing anything in the Cloud with the notable exception of my Yahoo! mail which I don’t have a choice. Why would I want to pay a monthly fee to store anything in the Cloud when you can buy a terabyte of storage for about $100. A TERABYTE! You could buy two and have one back up the other.

But it looks like using the Cloud for storing data is going to be the norm with the proliferation of new memory hogging applications designed for smartphones and netbooks whether I like it or not. The recent disaster with the Sidekick from T-Mobile seemed to vindicate my outmoded stance. Something happened to the server or the database software that was storing and managing information for about a million T-Mobile customers who pay a monthly fee for the service. The server either crashed or the database got corrupted or both and there was no backup. Those poor people lost everything, notes, pictures, e-mails, calendar info, contact lists, everything. Gone. Kaput. They were told it was unrecoverable. A few days later, thankfully, T-Mobile said “most” of the data was retrieved. But still. I would be hard pressed to trust the system again. You would expect the service provider to have redundancies in place to protect the data. I guess they didn’t.

As new mobile devices come to market that have much more capability and many more data intensive applications, the need for storage is only going to accelerate. While onboard storage is getting denser and cheaper, it will not keep pace with these memories hungry applications. There is even talk of having HD video recording and playback on these future devices. It’s inevitable that having a spot in the Cloud for the data you create will become a necessity. Let’s hope this incident with the Sidekick will spur the service providers on to develop systems that are failsafe.