The price of DDR5 memory is setting new highs these days as demand badly outstrips supply. In a bid to save money, Meta is recovering legacy DDR4 memory from used servers and is installing it into new machines using its in-house developed Vistara ASIC that enables it to connect old memory modules to its latest servers running AMD EPYC 'Turin' processors that only support DDR5 memory.
Interestingly, Meta is not the only company developing such a solution. Panmnesia, a startup from South Korea, has developed an off-the-shelf CXL controller and switch that enables servers to attach considerably larger memory pools without extending latency, which differentiates Panmnesia’s solution from competing CXL offerings.
