Violin has developed the industry’s first switched memory architecture. This patent-pending architecture is called Violin Switched Memory (VXM).  With VXM, each module is part of a switched array which supports large topologies and fault tolerance while enabling multiple memory types. Unlike other memory interconnects, VXM was designed from the ground-up for power efficiency and performance.

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, to just one or two. Fully Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) repeated bus technology allows 8 modules per channel and uses 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.

Memory architectures for enterprise-class applications and the networking industry will benefit from the evolution from memory buses to a Switched Memory architecture to meet their performance, scalability, manageability and fault tolerance requirements.