A solution to RAM-aggedon? AMD buys startup to transform SSDs into cheap 'virtual RAM' to cut price, its third attempt at solving memory conundrum after RAMdisk and StoreMI

AMD has seen its Instinct GPUs continue to get traction in an increasingly competitive marketplace, as it continues to take data center market share from new and existing players and ekes out wins with gaming-centric CPUs in the consumer market.

Its most recent acquisition of MEXT, an AI-centric startup that currently deploys software that allows users to treat NAND flash as DRAM at an operating system level.

AMD says Santa Clara-based MEXT a "pioneer in AI-driven memory optimization technology".

SSD storage to DRAM for data centers?

The idea that MEXT builds on is hardly a new one, but one that it seems to have refined considerably, making it an important acquisition at a time when hyperscalers continue to struggle with limited DRAM availability, even as an even worse SSD crisis looks to be on the horizon.

MEXT's Predictive Memory is essentially a tiering engine that monitors which memory pages applications tend to access, treating regularly accessed sections as "hot" working sets kept in DRAM while offloading "cold" or less frequently accessed sections to SSDs.

This allows for a far lower performance offset than using all of one's flash memory as DRAM, with the latter being an order of magnitude faster for access, even as speed becomes a driving factor for newer chips that are increasingly memory-bound.

There is also an important economic factor at play here: DRAM is nearly 50 times more expensive than the corresponding NAND flash, making cost and scalability key considerations for most data centers looking to avoid an already expensive DRAM market that is slated to only get worse over time.

The move itself is not AMD's first foray into the storage segment, with its consumer-focused StoreMi offering essentially allowing a faster SSD to work as a cache, making up for slower drives on one's system by essentially creating a copy of files that regularly need to be loaded or accessed on the fastest possible storage solution.

Its lesser-known (and since abandoned) Radeon RAMdisk offering allows users to do the exact opposite of what MEXT is offering: creating a very fast virtual disk on existing system memory. even as enthusiasts have replicated the idea on AMD's ultra-fast 3D V-Cache tech.

AMD's purchase makes sense given how deeply embedded its hardware is expected to be in datacenters over the next decade, and one could argue that MEXT's team, which offers expertise in AI infrastructure and memory systems, could be a much more prized acquisition than the underlying technology it offers.

AI and chip talent have become increasingly difficult to lock in, with companies splurging to attract some of the biggest names in both segments, and MEXT's acquisition could help both AMD's short-term and long-term goals in the data center segment.