Thanks for the (Cheap) Memories

By Doug Barney

Two weeks ago my son Nick ordered a new MacBook and paid $150 for an extra gig of RAM. That’s right, $150 a gig. What is this, the 1990s?

Not all memory is this expensive, but RAM makes up a lot of the price of today’s computers, especially high-end workstations and servers.

MetaRAM,  Inc. (San Jose, CA) claims it has an answer.

Its new DDR2 MetaSDRAM increases the density of random memory, allowing up to four times as much RAM to be packed on a single motherboard. Pretty sweet.

MetaRAM was founded by Fred Web, the former CTO of AMD who also has a degree in Physics from Harvard. The rest of the executive team was recruited largely from AMD and NVIDIA. Investors include Intel and Vinod Khosla, one of the most revered venture capitalists in all of Silicon Valley.

As if that wasn’t enough, Bill Joy serves on the board of directors. Joy not only co-founded Sun Microsystems, but also wrote BSD Unix, and drove the creation of Java and the SPARC processor family.

How much RAM do you have and is it ever enough? Write me at [email protected].

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_8357294?nclick_check=1