MRM – Managed-Retention Memory (MRM). A January 2025 Microsoft research paper said that MRM is different from volatile DRAM as it can retain data without power and does not waste energy in frequent cell refreshes, but unlike SCM (Storage-Class Memory), is not aimed at long-term retention times. As most of the inference data does not need to be persisted, retention can be relaxed to days or hours. In return, MRM has better endurance and aims to outperform DRAM (and HBM) on the key metrics such as read throughput, energy efficiency and capacity.
The paper authors conclude: “By relaxing retention time requirements, MRM can potentially enable existing proposed SCM technologies to offer better read throughput, energy efficiency, and density. We hope this paper really opens new thinking about innovation in memory cell technologies and memory chip design, tailored specifically to the needs of AI inference clusters.”