(Image credit: AMD) AMD on Monday announced that it had acquired MEXT, a startup that developed a memory tiering technology that makes NAND flash memory appear as DRAM to the operating system, which enables operators of data centers to save money on DRAM. AMD expects the acquisition to help customers improve system efficiency, lower operating costs, and deploy large-scale workloads more quickly. Go deeper with TH Premium: AI and data centers As AI models continue to expand and datasets grow larger, memory availability has become an increasingly important factor affecting overall system performance. In many cases, memory resources, not CPUs or GPUs, are becoming a performance bottleneck. Meanwhile, in many cases DRAM is used inefficiently. MEXT addresses memory efficiency challenges with an AI-based memory tiering technology that moves infrequently accessed data from expensive DRAM to NAND storage, which costs orders of magnitude less per unit of capacity, and in a way that's transparent to applications.…