FLC is an architecture that redefines memory on everything from data centers to wearables. FLC has the potential to spark the development of a new class of lower-cost and lower- power products and cut the DRAM needed in a system by as much as 10x, while cutting the energy consumed to about half what is used today. How? If you look at what’s actually being used on your computer or portable device, only a small percentage of the application code loaded into the main memory is usually active. Take a look for yourself. For example, look at the process monitor in Windows task manager. You will see that most of the applications are idle, yet in aggregate require a significant amount of DRAM space. In fact, nearly 90 to 99 percent of most DRAMs are idle.
And it works! Our engineering mobile phone platform, shown in this video, uses FLC to play back video smoothly, without any lag or stutter. App switching is also zippy. Such performance is common on mid- or even high-end phones with large DRAM, yet this design used only 768MB of DRAM in the implementation. Time-sensitive streams are mapped to a 512MB non-cacheable area, while another 256 DRAM is used in FLC to emulate 1GB of memory. Hence, it provides similar performance to 1.5GB of main memory in traditional DRAM-based designs. FLC can also emulate larger quantities of main memory. The second proof of concept demonstrates smooth video performance on the same mobile phone platform using FLC.
By offloading storage to cheaper SSD memory, the world can also dramatically reduce overall power consumption and energy needs. For example, a 50 percent reduction in all computer energy use equates to a two percent decrease in rural power needs. Battery life of laptops will be increased, as well as IoT devices that could last weeks before recharging. It changes the future of supercomputers as well. With FLC, you can replace an entire server room with a small portable device. Super computing and computational sets will become faster and more efficient, with future super computers containing tens of terabytes of memory instead of hundreds of gigabytes.
Marvell FLC will not only redefine memory--but all of computing.
See Marvell FLC in action in the following proof of concept videos: