Meta's solution to the global memory shortage is to use DDR4 in a DDR5 server, with a custom chip making the impossible possible

Just imagine you're Meta. You've spent millions of dollars on new servers that only use DDR5 sticks, only to find that you still don't have enough memory. The solution? Yoink the DDR4 modules out of the old servers and, through the power of a custom chip, splice the two systems together to go ham with RAM.

Even if you only have a little bit of knowledge about how CPUs and memory work together, you'll probably know that this shouldn't be possible. But as TechSpot reports, it can be done: you just need something to translate the DDR5-talk from the CPU to DDR4-lingo that the old memory sticks can understand.

Bridging the gap between the AMD Zen 5-powered Epyc processors and the last-gen memory tech is something called a Compute Express Link (CXL), with Meta's custom chip named Vistara. This manages the bundle of DDR4 sticks as a separate pool of memory, albeit one that's much slower than the main pool of DDR5.

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