Netlist at UBS Conference

The UBS conference goes over the Romley market, but has some estimates for the DDR4 market (3 years from now) - Chris Lopes extrapolates the conservative (1% of servers) estimate to give a $7.5B figure.


quote:
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at the 02:25 minute mark:

The market for cloud server units is expected to grow at about a 20% clip over the next 4 years.

So it's an exciting market for us.

If we take a very quick snapshot of the size of the market for us.

Industry analysts are estimating about 20% of the newest and latest Intel (INTC) family of servers - Romley family - would use a "load reduced" or a "rank multiplied" memory.

And that's what we call our "HyperCloud" memory.


at the 02:55 minute mark:

Whether you agree with that or not, let's just use a ONE percent (1%) of that number - to keep the math really simple.

You get an idea of how big and how fast this market can grow.

So if we use a 1% estimate - there's about 9M servers sold in the world this year - so let's take 1%, let's call it a 100,000 servers for next year.

And each server that uses high density memory typically fully loads that memory - and that can be anywhere from 12 to 24 sockets (DIMM sockets/slots) in each of these servers.

Let's just use 10 to 12 (sockets/slots) to keep the numbers easy again.

So we take a 100,000 servers - we take 10 DIMMs per .. 10 memory modules in each one - you've got a million (1M) units.

Well millions of anything is not a great market .. USUALLY. Because we are talking semiconductors in the conference here today .. uh .. chips are $10 to $20, $30 .. but in our case we are selling subsystems.

And our subsystems average between the 16GB and 32GB around $500 each.


at the 03:50 minute mark:

So even at a very very conservative estimate .. 1% of the servers, only 10 DIMMs per server, we are looking at a $500 ASP (average selling price) or $500M in revenue for next year.

Now that's a pretty significant growth from where we are today .. so .. hence the excitement about the opportunity in this market.
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quote:
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at the 15:10 minute mark:

So now we .. remember we talked about what the market looked like for next year and we just said .. "well if it was just 10%" .. uh .. or 1% rather .. 1% of the market.

We had a $500M market opportunity.

Now let's look out for 2014 .. because as we increase to DDR4 speeds, the frequency goes WAY up .. and when the frequency goes up, the effect of the bus .. the memory bus is huge.


at the 15:30 minute mark:

So the industry's estimating they'll need 50% of all servers .. and it will be about 13M to 14M units, up from 9M today .. uh .. will require some kind of "load reduction" (technology) .. HyperCloud-type technology (or the LRDIMM which is infringing NLST IP - though LRDIMMs have latency issues).

If we take 10% of that, let's call it 1.3M servers and let's use 12 DIMMs per server, as an average .. now the densities move up .. so instead of 16GB and 32GB today, we'll talk 32GB and 64GB .. 3 years from now .. we're looking at ABOUT a $7.5B market size.


at the 16:05 minute mark:

So .. significant growth .. we think we are well positioned for where the industry NEEDS to go, where it wants to go, and how to get there.

And our technology scales very well .. along that.


I hope we can see more applications using future NVvault, for example, as a Non-Volatile standard memory removing the need for UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) all-together.

NetVault or NVvault are used for RAID storage because in case of power outage, sensitive RAID-related status info is lost (which is still in memory).

If you use NetVault/NVvault you be sure that that info will not be lost.

It is like an automatic "Hibernate" feature (as on Windows computers) - there it hibernates to hard disk, while with NVvault it is done to the memory module itself (which has flash memory to match the DRAM memory) and a backup is made to the flash memory there.

This is for servers etc. - however if you talk about RAID products for the home user, you can see how valuable this can be.

The replacement of battery-backed by "supercapacitor" backed (as in more recent NVvault vs. the earlier NetVault-BB battery backed) means you don't need periodic maintenance to replace the battery.

Which this saves money for server applications, if you talk about home appliances or home RAID storage products it could make many products viable which were earlier not feasible. For instance a home RAID storage product that used battery-backed memory would require the home user to replace the battery - and this type of intervention by the home user is not practical for many products (esp. products which run on mains AC supply and don't have their own battery).

For instance a home RAID storage product that used battery-backed memory would require the home user to replace the battery - and this type of intervention by the home user is not practical for many products (esp. products which run on mains AC supply and don't have their own battery).

Sorry - I meant if the memory module relies on it's own battery (called "battery-backed" non-volatile memory) - then the user would have to periodically replace that battery - something which may not be viable for products that tout a plug-and-play type of use for home users.

In general NVvault maybe useful for any appliance that runs on mains AC (which can be prone to glitches or outages).