AMD is licensing a RAM technology from Innovative Silicon.
Microprocessor company Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has signed a technology license for “floating-body” silicon-on-insulator (SOI) memory developed by startup company Innovative Silicon Inc. AMD (Sunnyvale, Calif.) said it is interested in the Z-RAM (zero capacitor) technology for use in its microprocessors.
Memory bandwidth is always an issue with microprocessors. You can ameliorate the effects of bad programming with larger caches, but in the embedded world, there are limits to what you can do with caches. The bad programming comes in when software engineers pay more attention to elegance of design than system performance. The result is called “bloatware” because the size of the binary images is much larger than it has to be. This leads to more memory references to load large structures for which only some use is made, or memory references being spread out, causing multiple cache lines to be flushed, or executable code thrashing cache lines. Since embedded devices are getting more graphical user interfaces, adding more cache is just about the only thing that can be done.
Since smarter programming is out of the question.