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Actually there is magnetic equivalent: http://www.ramtron.com/products/nonvolatile-memory/serial.aspx

F-RAM comes in an SOIC, so you'd have to solder some wires to the "Flash Destroyer" board.

I never tried to compare FRAM to MRAM. I'm an embedded guy, so FRAM is just fine for me. A 150nS cycle time might seem slow to the GHz crowd, but for the vast majority of computers on earth (the little ones no one pays attention to in their cars and STBs and phones) it's just fine.

As for the points:
1. They changed the process slightly, but that doesn't mean it's brand new news. I like the Freescale guys a lot, but touting it as a worlds first is misleading.
2. MRAM has had some very impressive scaling reported for a number of years now. Motorola poured an obscene amount of money into it back before they sold their memory businesses off and spun out Freescale. Even after all these years and hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars, we're only getting a 4Mbit chip. Plan on patience.
3. The day I can get a computer that uses no spinning storage and no volatile memory is the day I have the jack installed in my head. It'll happen eventually, I'm sure, but not soon and definitely not cheap. I'm betting military applications will drive it more than foreign innovation.
4. I talked about FRAM partly as a contrast (despite my fat-fingering the link to Ramtron), but mainly because it's what's on my desk right now. A few K of parallel FRAM storage for scratch space, and a couple of big I2C units for storage.
5. Of course. FRAM is for small things.

I'm not trying to be bitter or mean, but the chip isn't at all what the OP thought. It's for embedded systems, and I want people to recognize that.

I assume you meant Ramtron, not the misspelled "rantron" in the URL.

For modern, commercially available magnetic memory, you could use FRAM (ferroelectric RAM).

They could use FRAM (Ferromagnetic Random Access Memory)

It is as fast as RAM, but is non-volatile. Oh, and its endurance is unlimited. Right now they aren't big enough, but a the technology improves...

I know of some memory available *right now* that is *not* volatile and runs at *huge* speeds. Admissably, it is only available in 256kb (32KB) sizes right now, but a 64Mb (8MB) version is almost ready for sale

Go to Ramtron Corporation or NV Technologies to see more!

Michael

I know of some memory available *right now* that is *not* volatile and runs at *huge* speeds. Admissably, it is only available in 256kb (32KB) sizes right now, but a 64Mb (8MB) version is almost ready for sale

Go to Ramtron Corporation or NV Technologies to see more!

Michael

I guess you could as long as you don't need to write things to the memory system after the first time...

You think hard drives wear out fast? Flash wears out faster. The numbers I've heard are between 1000 and 1,000,000,000 writes (depending on the make/model/brand). Of course, one possible solution is to use mostly flash, as well as some of the more long-lasting (in the presence of many, many writes) memory systems.

I just found this one for example.

As far as no moving parts...water coolers have moving parts and fans have moving parts...so unless you live in a very, very cold place, you're going to need moving parts. But I suppose you could do without a floppy, and it seems technically feasable to have a CD-ROM drive that has a laser which is difracted to reflect the entire surface all at once, and have millions of photoreceptors to read the entire disk image at once. Has anybody made one of those?

In March a team of IBM engineers led by William J. Gallagher and Stuart S. P. Parkin announced that it had constructed arrays of 14 bits from such tunnel junctions, as they are known. They have demonstrated bits that are as small as 200 nanometers wide and that switch in five nanoseconds or less, Gallagher reports.

Currently at 5MHz and 256kb the FRAM (Ferrous RAM) ICs that they have available aren't nearly fast enough to work as a replacement for the average desktop system. Ramtron doesn't offer much of a description of *how* FRAM works, but could this currently existing technology be built upon to fit the requirements?
I'm assuming a lot in thinking that this is similar technology (I hear ferrous, I think magnets), so I'd greatly appreciate a good whack on the head from any enlightened people.

While it might not be useful at all in desktop systems, it does certainly look like an excellent replacement for both SRAM and ((E)E)PROMs.
- Ek