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ZeroPoint Technologies wants to Compress the Data in your RAM

TheLostSwede

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Some of you might be old enough to remember various "RAM doubling" software software solutions that appeared back in the late 1980's for Apple, as well as in the mid 90's for Windows 95 computers. Most of them never really delivered on their claims, but now it looks like we might be getting something similar, albeit in hardware.

Swedish company ZeroPoint Technology AB has announced that it has raised €2.5 million in a seed round to bring its Ziptilion patented memory compression technology IP to the market. ZeroPoint claims a compression ratio of two to three times depending on the workload, which seems very impressive. Unlike current software compression technologies such as ZSWAP or ZRAM that are used to compress data in RAM at a rate of 1.4 to 1.5 times, ZeroPoint promises that it's hardware IP won't have any real world negative effects on system performance. In fact, they claim it'll only cause one nanosecond of extra latency when writing data and 100 nanoseconds delay when it comes to reading the compressed data from RAM.



Ziptilion has already been implemented into a product using TSMC's 28 nm node, using an AXI bus at 800 MHz, which resulted in a memory throughput of 32 GB/s. It's not clear what product this is, but based on the manufacturing node it suggests it might just be an ARM based test platform. ZeroPoint claims that its IP is easy to integrate with existing hardware designs, as it's placed on the memory access path and thus doesn't require changes to the memory controller itself, although it does require a software device driver element which might limit some potential applications.

In something like a normal desktop computer on a 7 nm node, the Ziptilion IP is expected to only use up about 1.36 square millimetres for a standard dual-channel RAM configuration. On a server CPU with 8-channels of RAM, this is estimated to increase to about 3.02 square milimetres. ZeroPoint is expecting it's IP to find its way into servers, embedded systems and smartphone SoCs to start with and the company is already working on its next generation Ziptiolion+ technology which appears to further increase the compression factor depending on the specific target application. Not all kinds of data compress the same, based on ZeroPoint's whitepaper.


The boldest claim made by ZeroPoint is that they claim you'll see the same system performance gains in most of their tested scenarios, as you would from doubling your system RAM. In addition to this, ZeroPoint also claims to increase the effective memory bandwidth in a system, due to the compressed data taking up less bandwidth when being transferred between the RAM and the CPU. The whitepaper also seems to hint at the possibility of Ziptilion being used with GPUs, at least in something like an SoC, where the RAM is shared between the CPU and GPU.

It all sounds a little bit too good to be true, but the company has been researching its memory compression algorithms for the past 15 years, so it doesn't sound like a money grabbing scam, unlike the RAM doubling software back in the day.

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1996 Dolly? No RAM!
 
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Data compression in RAM? Why? Today, RAM is reasonably priced for most people and use-case scenario's. 20 years ago this would have been useful. Today? Dubious...
This is a solution for servers mostly, not for average Joe. There RAM really matters. ;)
 
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Data compression in RAM? Why? Today, RAM is reasonably priced for most people and use-case scenario's. 20 years ago this would have been useful. Today? Dubious...
ZeroPoint is expecting it's IP to find its way into servers, embedded systems and smartphone SoCs to start with
So RAM limited applications?
 
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This is a solution for servers mostly, not for average Joe. There RAM really matters. ;)
While that's fair, how bad is it really? The servers I work with rarely reach full allocation. Granted those are servers with 2TB per rack, but still..
 
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It all sounds a little bit too good to be true, but the company has been researching its memory compression algorithms for the past 15 years, so it doesn't sound like a money grabbing scam, unlike the RAM doubling software back in the day.
If they found an algorithm that is useful in most cases and detrimental in relatively few cases and are able to implement this in hardware (which should make it possible to achieve the low latency addition they claim) it does not sound too good to be true.

Especially with them talking about adding their IP to the CPU side with memory controller - wouldn't it be bandwidth boost as well as size? GPUs have been using DCC for a while now for similar purpose. Although at a storage level, hardware compression of storage data before sending it over PCIe to NVMe SSD - that both new generation consoles do and DirectStorage will support on PC soon - falls into similar category.
 
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If you store data in RAM you want max speed. If speed is not a priority, swap to SSD.
I don't remember RAM compression being a thing on Amiga...
 

TheLostSwede

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@TheLostSwede It's in game/gag category which is for joke-programs. It probably just patches the system to show double the overall memory. I'd remove Amiga mention from the article ;-)
 

TheLostSwede

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@TheLostSwede It's in game/gag category which is for joke-programs. It probably just patches the system to show double the overall memory. I'd remove Amiga mention from the article ;-)
Fair enough.
 
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Data compression in RAM? Why? Today, RAM is reasonably priced for most people and use-case scenario's. 20 years ago this would have been useful. Today? Dubious...
Didn't stop Microsoft from adding it on Windows 10. Granted, it's only used for things that are just loaded in memory but not currently in use, but the feature is still there.
 
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This likely won't mix with cloud servers with encrypted memory. Hard pass.
 
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Windows 10 already does some limited data compression in system RAM. For instance...
1631544634538.png
 
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IIRC Windows compresses only what is paged - it doesn't compress working set.
 
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Windows 10 already does some limited data compression in system RAM. For instance...
View attachment 216761
This is a different layer of technology. Windows compresses inactive memory regions. When it becomes active, Windows decompress it and place it back, uncompressed, into the memory, then resume operation. So it is a memory management strategy, a common OS capability, just more sophisticated. In older OS, they just swap the mess into HDD.

Whole memory encryption/compression is a hardware feature. Ideally it should be transparent to all upper layers and all computations. No matter inactive/active, OS/user level. It is a hardware architecture design.

A direct contrast: There is one region of memory that Windows 10 can never ever compress: itself.
 
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Didn't stop Microsoft from adding it on Windows 10. Granted, it's only used for things that are just loaded in memory but not currently in use, but the feature is still there.
Right, but we're not talking about inactive data, the article above is talking about real-time full memory space compression. I'm not saying it wouldn't be useful in some situations, but unless such a scheme can be done by an ASIC on DIMM, there will be a system resource overhead which will eat into overall system performance. And I say no thank you. RAM is cheap. Just get more..

IIRC Windows compresses only what is paged - it doesn't compress working set.
If it's paged, it's not in RAM, that's the whole point of a pagefile/swapfile.
 
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If it's paged, it's not in RAM.
Nope. W10 has memory store which is a kind of compressed page file in RAM. When memory manager figures something out of the process' working set, it swaps it to that store in compressed form. If memory pressure increases it swaps it to the page file (still in compressed form).
 
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Nope. W10 has memory store which is a kind of compressed page file in RAM.
That would be a RAM store, not a page file.

When memory manager figures something out of the process' working set, it swaps it to that store in compressed form. If memory pressure increases it swaps it to the page file (still in compressed form).
Right, so how was the above statement incorrect?
 
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company is already working on its next generation Ziptiolion+

Anyone know exactly how many "+" signs we can expect this so-called new tech to go through before we can actually say that it works or doesn't work ?

Just wondering if they are planning to follow intel's skylake/14nm ++++++++++++++++++ path & milk it for every penny they can get, hehehehehe :)
 

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wait til Qualcomm buys them out and your 16GB RAM phone turns out to have 8, compressed
 
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Data compression in RAM? Why? Today, RAM is reasonably priced for most people and use-case scenario's. 20 years ago this would have been useful. Today? Dubious...

It was very common back in the days to use a util like this. Software for "only" 49.95$ or so instead of a 4MB additional ramstick for 200 to 400$.

But it would add extra latency, cycles etc and back in the days with such hardware it was a huge performance impact compared to todays standards.

Ram compression at hardware level could actually work. You could dense far more data into a stick then without. Imagine if this would work on GPU's too. You could save perhaps half of the bandwidth normally needed for graphics or compute operations. Not something small.
 
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It was very common back in the days to use a util like this. Software for "only" 49.95$ or so instead of a 4MB additional ramstick for 200 to 400$.
Did you actually WATCH that video? Yeah, you should actually watch it and then come back and think your statement over..
But it would add extra latency, cycles etc and back in the days with such hardware it was a huge performance impact compared to todays standards.

Ram compression at hardware level could actually work. You could dense far more data into a stick then without. Imagine if this would work on GPU's too. You could save perhaps half of the bandwidth normally needed for graphics or compute operations. Not something small.
I understand how compression works and the context at play in the article. You're missing a few points though..
 
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