Technology

Violin has developed the industry's first switched memory architecture that provides a highly scalable memory solution. This patent-pending architecture is called Violin Switched Memory (VXM).

Violin Switched Memory (VXM) is the industry's first memory solution developed specifically for applications with large datasets including image, video, scientific data and web content. These large dataset applications can leverage the following technology benefits:

	Terabyte scale memory in small footprints
	Memory fault tolerance
	Power savings of up to 90% per GByte
	Flash and DRAM Flexibility

Previous memory solutions have not scaled because they relied on classical linear bus topologies. Bus speeds limit the number of registered DIMMs that can be supported in a single channel to fewer than eight and, as speeds increase, just one or two!

The Fully Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) repeated bus technology allows 8 modules per channel and use a serial technology to reduce the pin-count required. However, FB-DIMM provides only a minor improvement in scale and requires significant additional power for the Advanced Memory Buffer (AMB) chip.

The networking industry identified the inherent weaknesses of buses (coaxial Ethernet) and repeated buses (10/100BaseT hubs) and moved to a switched architecture (Ethernet switches) to meet their performance, scalability, manageability and fault tolerance requirements.

Memory architectures for enterprise-class applications will benefit from the same evolution from buses to a switched architecture. VXM will enable systems to meet the growing capacity and reliability requirements of large dataset applications.