Samsung's TSV (RAM stacking) - Future Consoles?

[AlNom]

Digitimes reports that Samsung has developed very high density DDR 2 RAM chips (2Gb/chip).

In today's MCPs, memory chips are connected by wire bonding, requiring vertical and horizontal spacing between dies. By contrast, Samsung's WSP technology forms laser-cut micron-sized holes that penetrate the silicon vertically to connect the memory circuits directly with a copper filling, eliminating the need for gaps of extra space and wires protruding beyond the sides of the dies.

Could this be the way for future consoles to have extremely huge amounts of RAM (while keeping the number of chips the same)? What might be the potential problems (heat dissipation, frequency, memory bus width) ?

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Price will be alot more important than space. You could probably easily fit 1+gb of ram in the Wii but the reason they wont do that is because it would make the console to expensive (same for x360 and ps3).

 

[Carl B]

Samsung's not the only one with vertical memory tech, so I don't doubt future consoles will utilize it; but then again so will everything else that uses large amounts of RAM. The main advantage (in the hypothetical) is cheaper RAM relative to two separate chips - it's not a bandwidth alleviator, though it would allow for higher densities in a fixed bandwidth environment vs what might otherwise be achieved.

 

[Squeak]

I see a lot of potential in this technology as a way to overcome the age old "tyranny of numbers", that has been rearing its ugly head since computers were invented.

It wouldn't only mean that you can get a lot of RAM into one package, with sufficient cooling it would also mean that you could get the CPU, GPU and whatnot in there too, with colossal bandwidth and very little latency.

This is indeed a very interesting new idea.

 

[3dilettante]

The sufficient cooling part of that argument is one of the big reasons why this will be a difficult problem.

Yields will be another issue. Proper testing for a chip is done after it is already situated on the substrate. It's a massive waste of cash if you stack a gig of RAM, a GPU, and a CPU together, then find out one of those components is borked.