Silicon Valley startup MetaRam, which received money from three of the four founders of Sun Microsystems, announced an advanced chipset which can quadruple the maximum amount of memory which can be used in a certain server configuration. Furthermore, the price will allegedly be fairly low.

Their DDR2 MetaSDRAM is currently available in R-DIMMs from Hynix Semiconductor, Inc. and SMART Modular Technologies.

"I've spent my career focused on building balanced computer systems and providing compatible and evolutionary innovations. With the emergence of multi-core and multi-threaded 64 bit CPUs, I realized that the memory system is once again the biggest bottleneck in systems and so set out to address this problem," said Fred Weber, CEO of MetaRAM, in a statement. Weber is the former Chief Technology Officer of Advanced Micro Devices and one of the main designers of the powerful Opteron processors.

"MetaRAM's new MetaSDRAM does just that by bringing breakthrough main memory capacity to mainstream servers at unprecedented price points, without requiring any changes to existing CPUs, chipsets, motherboards, BIOS or software."

The problem was that each 64-bit processor core could use only a limited amount of memory, because of design limitations, such as the 40-bit register in the Opteron. Also, older 32-bit cores can use only 4GB of RAM. The new technology enables servers to use up to 128GB of memory per processor, which means a 8-processor server can use one terabyte of memory.

A secondary problem was that high-capacity memory modules were exponentially expensive as their capacity increased. This is why MetaRam claims that with a four-processor server with 16 cores and 256GB of RAM, the price range now starts at under $50,000, compared with almost $500,000 for a classical system with the same configuration, a 90 percent reduction in system cost.

"MetaRAM's technology presented an opportunity for Intel to participate as both an investor and a strategic technology collaborator to deliver a compatible solution that enhances system performance," said Bryan Wolf, managing director, Enterprise Platforms, Intel Capital, in MetaRAM's statement.