Startup ZeroPoint Compresses Memory on the Fly
by Jim Turley
Memory. What’cha gonna do with it, amirite? It’s too slow, too expensive, it takes up too much space on your board, and the supply is more volatile than a honey badger on acid. But every system needs memory, and the more processors you have, the more memory you need. Too bad there isn’t a way to, y’know, somehow make half of those problems go away.
Wish granted. A Gothenburg Sweden–based startup called ZeroPoint Technologies (ZPT) thinks it has come up with a solution: an all-hardware IP block that nestles in between your chip’s processor(s) and memory controller(s), cutting memory usage by more than half, slashing bandwidth on the external bus, and trimming the power consumed by all those read/write cycles.