IBM has devised a way to triple the amount of memory stored on computer chips and double the performance of data-hungry processors by replacing a problematic type of memory with a variety that uses much less space on the slice of silicon.

International Business Machines Corp. said Wednesday that its new memory technology will help unclog crippling bottlenecks that build up as increasingly powerful microprocessors attempt to retrieve data from a separate memory chip faster than it can be delivered.

”We kill ourselves in the semiconductor industry to try to get a little bit more performance in each generation. What we’re doing here is trying to merge two technologies … on the same chip to get significantly more memory,” said Lisa Su, vice president for semiconductor research and development at IBM.

Armonk, New York-based IBM said its solution entails swapping out most of the static random access memory, or SRAM, used to store information directly on computer chips and integrating onto the chip another kind of memory, known as dynamic random access memory, or DRAM.

SRAM is a type of memory that’s fast and easy to manufacture but takes up a lot of valuable real estate on the chips. DRAM, the most common type of memory used in personal computers, has typically been stored on a separate chip and has previously been viewed as too slow to be integrated directly onto the microprocessor.

IBM said it has been able to speed up the DRAM to the point where it’s nearly as fast as SRAM, and that the result is a type of memory known as embedded DRAM, or eDRAM, that helps boost the performance of chips with multiple core calculating engines and is particularly suited for enabling the movement of graphics in gaming and other multimedia applications. DRAM will also continue to be used off the chip.

If you’ve ever run Memtest86 on a computer, you may have noticed the differences in speed between the various types of memory - Level 1 (cache) is much faster than Level 2 (cache) which is much faster than system RAM. This innovation would put more Level 1 and Level 2 cache memory on the processor die itself, closer to the processor. This would increase its speed considerably!