AMD Stretches Server DRAM With Flash Extended Memory
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AMD Stretches Server DRAM With Flash Extended Memory
Timothy Prickett Morgan
Timothy Prickett<br>Morgan
Co-Editor, Co-Founder, The Next Platform
Published<br>mon 29 Jun 2026 // 16:20 UTC
There is a crisis building in the datacenter, and it is centered around the scarcity of and ridiculously high prices for DRAM main memory. The GenAI boom has caused the hyperscalers, cloud builders, AI model builders, and neoclouds to hog what has become the limited capacity coming out of the memory foundries of Micron Technology, Samsung, and SK Hynix, and the demand shock is causing unprecedented price hikes.<br>How bad is it? According to Counterpoint Research, which tracks component pricing, 64 GB DIMM memory prices rose by a factor of 3.5X between Q3 2025 and Q1 2026, and it sure looks like they will be up by a factor of 5X by Q3 2026. And according to the most recent financials from Micron, which I reported on here, there is no end in sight to the demand shock out to 2028, which means prices will keep getting higher.
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As it is, DRAM main memory has gone from representing around 50 percent of the cost of a server, with CPUs being about a quarter of the bill of materials in 2023, with other peripherals and flash and disk storage comprising the other half, to DRAM being somewhere between 60 percent and 90 percent of the cost of a server here in the middle of 2026, averaging around 75 percent. Those CPUs didn’t get cheaper, and even still, because memory prices are skyrocketing the increasing CPU prices look small by comparison.<br>Something has to give, and the one thing that can be done for sure is that main memory can be used more efficiently and it can even be extended with flash, which has been a kind of Holy Grail for people in the flash business for more than a decade and which was the point of the 3D XPoint storage that Intel and Micron launched with much fanfare back in July 2015.<br>The promise of 3D XPoint was to have something that had performance somewhere between DRAM and flash, that was byte addressable like main memory, but had a cost more like flash. Because Intel didn’t ramp 3D XPoint fast enough, both in terms of manufacturing and in technology, it ended up being almost as costly as DRAM and only a few multiples faster than flash. Had Intel not decided to try to keep 3D XPoint as something just for its own Xeon server processors, it may have gone mainstream and helped solve the current memory crisis. But alas, Intel lost its mind a little bit and killed off 3D XPoint and sold off its flash business to SK Hynix in a classic “burn the furniture to keep the house warm” maneuver. Imagine the profits Intel would have now if it was still in the flash business. . . .<br>And now, the three big memory makers are allocating more and more of their DRAM production to pricey HBM stacked memory, which is cutting back on normal DRAM chips used in server DIMM modules, and they are also cutting back on flash output to try to boost DRAM. DRAM and flash production will increase by maybe 20 percent to 25 percent per year, and demand is crazy higher than that. And so DRAM and flash prices go up and up as the Big Three sell capacity to the highest bidders and are getting filthy rich.
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This is why AMD just shelled out an undisclosed amount of money to acquire a shiny new startup called MEXT, whose name is meant to invoke the idea of memory extension. The MEXT team has come up with a way of transparently and invisibly extending DRAM main memory to flash storage.<br>People have been trying to do this since back in the Fusion-io days, and Gary Smerdon, co-founder and chief executive officer at the formerly independent MEXT, which was founded in 2023 and which only dropped out of stealth mode back in early April of this year, knows this full well because he was chief strategy and product officer at Fusion-io back then. (Fusion-io was the first big commericalizer of flash storage for servers, and had both Apple and Meta Platforms as its anchor customers more than a decade ago.)<br>For six years before the Fusion-io gig, Smerdon led the solid state memory efforts at LSI Logic. More recently, Smerdon was co-founder and chief executive officer at TidalScale, which created a HyperKernel hypervisor that allowed companies to create large-scale virtual NUMA servers out of smaller physical NUMA servers. TidalScale raised $70.3 million in multiple rounds and was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise in December 2022. (We have no idea what HPE has done with HyperKernel since then.)<br>There is chatter on the Internet that MEXT had raised $2.4 million in seed funding, but we suspect it was more than that. Clear, DN Capital, Uncorrelated, Raptor, and FJ Labs were all seed money suppliers.
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Many of the 39 employees of MEXT hail from TidalScale, as you might expect, but Smerdon brought in some outside expertise on...