MRAM in 2004
This wired article has an update on MRAM. IBM and Moto working with a few others are trying to bring this out quicker than originally planned.
Basics:
6 x faster than current (static) ram.
and it does not forget when power is lost. (a REAL low power sleep.)
Bring on my 3Ghz G5 with MRAM... I should have saved enough by the time its ready!
Basics:
6 x faster than current (static) ram.
and it does not forget when power is lost. (a REAL low power sleep.)
Bring on my 3Ghz G5 with MRAM... I should have saved enough by the time its ready!
Comments
For instance, they say that the technology will end up in various little handheld devices. Why stop there? Is it expensive (note that price is mentioned nowhere). Does it not scale up well past the demands of PDAs and SRAM caches (a couple of MB, tops?).
The news that it's coming ahead of schedule is promising, because it's a very nice technology that I've been waiting for for a while now. But they don't even mention personal computers, and so I'm afraid that you'll be buying your MRAM-based Mac around or after the time you unroll your new OLED Cinema HD and stick it to the wall.
Originally posted by Gargoyle
Bring on my 3Ghz G5 with MRAM... I should have saved enough by the time its ready!
Hold yer horses
Amorph is right, it is currently produced only for applications that require very little RAM. Unfortunately, this link is only availble in german (it is from the leading German computer mag), but the article details that they are currently producing 128 and 256 KBit chips (yes, thats 16 and 32KByte) on a 180nm process.
Doubtlessly, they will improve the chip sizes quickly - but until they reach 1000x the capacity, this will not be seen in Macs.
In order for hard drives to continue flourishing, the industry is going to need a radical change that will make the "next generation" drive an order of magnitude faster than the ones currently available. Including SATA.
Originally posted by Moogs
It's going to be a long time before there is affordable, Non-volatile RAM for the desktop. But the technology itself offers tremendous promise once it is stable enough. Within ten or twelve years, I have to wonder if personal computers will ship with hard drives at all.
It will be a huge boon to portable computing when they no longer have to. Other applications will also benefit, mostly just because hard drives tend to flake out before any other part of a computer.
Eventually everything will be stored in RAM and backed up to CD, DVD or whatever replaces the DVD.
I hope they improve those technologies, then, because writable CDs never quite achieved the simplicity or (initial) reliability of floppies, and all "burned" optical media degrades awfully quickly for backup media - some cheap CD-Rs degrade within a year.
In order for hard drives to continue flourishing, the industry is going to need a radical change that will make the "next generation" drive an order of magnitude faster than the ones currently available. Including SATA.
They'll still lose out on power consumption, noise, spin-up time and reliability in low-end and portable applications. But there will continue to be a place for them, especially if capacities continue to increase at their current mind-boggling pace.
NRAM (non-volatile memory) - is expensive, and therefore not commonly used.
MRAM - would have to be cheaper, especially for use in an off the shelf system (for bulk) in the G5, charging $4,000 dollars for the top end G5 would probably be a good ceiling. But to cover all, you'd have to get the low end back down to a sub-2,000 range, too. With two highly experienced companies (with $$ to back them) I'm sure they will/could come up with a good solution.
But I want to ask the question of whether this technology really helps. If you should decide to "shut off" your computer and then turn it on in the morning, it comes up as quickly as a TV might turn on, then it decides to lock up from a word document, what will enable you to get that document back out of memory?
(Sorry, I don't think it would be a good idea to leave windows running for more than 3 days w/o a hard reboot, so I'm speaking about OS X, or Linux)
-Maybe Word will have a feature that will enable it to scan memory (afor. MRAM) and search for any word docs?
-Will OS X or Linux have a good 'recover from a failed session' that will be similiar to the 'Windows recovery option' on the WinXP discs only look for bit-morsels in RAM and not the Hard Drive, and actually work?
I think that with this new idea of storing contents into fast memory may come other consequences. Granted the idea sounds very good, but a year is fairly quick to be bringing them out to the desktop with out significant testing and updating from the O.S.'s standpoint as well as individual programs that don't save-to-file with every change made.
So for this, I'd say wait longer, wait for word on whether updates have been made before you buy into a new technology such as this. Theoretically it could be good.