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Instant Access Memory

Posted by emmett on from the i-don't-like-to-wait dept.

tnielson writes: "The April issue of Wired interviews Stuart Parkin, an IBM scientist developing MRAM; Non-volatile, fast, durable, and cheap. It should be great in an MP3 player, and according to the article, could make all of our computers instant-on! Problem is, five years is a long time to wait..."

37 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Instant On isn't accurate. by Effugas · · Score: 2

    Not having to route standby power is useful, but not essential. Tickling memory is about as simple of an operation as it gets! There's just no logic in it.

    As for milliseconds refreshing power, ye gads memory operates in the nano realm. This means memory is effectively realtime already.

    --Dan

  2. Re:No, I think it does affect instant-on by Effugas · · Score: 2

    MRAM makes it so you don't need to tickle your memory to keep the contents alive.

    It's not that hard to tickle memory. It's just that motherboards don't support doing it because operating systems have never known how to deal with it.

    Tickled DRAM is essentially identical to MRAM for purposes of nonvolitility within desktops and servers.

    --Dan

  3. Instant On isn't accurate. by Effugas · · Score: 4

    This is the guy who helped come up with GMR? I bow down to his technical skills. But it seems that this technology is being sold for something that it just isn't.

    Really, this just doesn't have much to do with instant on technology.

    It's true. As useful as it is to require no power to store a charge, neither desktops nor servers have any serious problem with power--they're both plugged into a wall! There's no reason for mature DRAM memory to not receive the trickle charge it requires to keep its contents from drifting away. Problems come when operating systems (primarily) and motherboard standards fail to build in stasis modes--for all the determinism of computers, I find it rather surprising that the entire system cannot be simultaneously frozen until a given restart interrupt is triggered. But that's the situation we face--it's not that the memory doesn't last, it's that we don't know how to deal with a house of cards we don't need to rebuild every so often.

    Where I see this technology being useful is in laptops, or anything else where "power just to suspend" is a real issue. Heck, even for normal operation, memory can be a real drain on power: Witness the effect of increasing from 2 to 8 MB of RAM on a Palm V(it's significant!). So this does matter for pervasive computing, as the article suggests.

    But it has almost nothing to do with "instant on". I do forsee it being implemented in systems which don't want to have to "recover state from hard drive" or "implement a trickle charge system to keep existing state", but that's not so much a break through. The reduced power load scene DOES seem interesting, but lets not forget just how mature a technlogy DRAM is. They'll have to do some pretty amazing work with the MRAM to surpass DRAM. By then, where will DRAM be? Remember, Intel has its dominance partly out of the sheer amount of resources they can put into making the horrifically complex x86 fast. 21bil is alot of money to lose to MRAM!

    Thoughts?

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com

    1. Re:Instant On isn't accurate. by angelo · · Score: 2

      I'd say dismissing this as a laptop thing is a bit out of bounds. The ability to suspend your system without power is good for desktops as well. It would be nice since board manufactures don't have to route standby power, decreasing complexity.

      Also, any milliseconds not spent refreshing power is a millisecond using data. Consider what this would do for realtime access.

      --
      Lowmag.net
    2. Re:Instant On isn't accurate. by kaphka · · Score: 2
      2)It still takes idiot windows2000 30+ seconds to boot up on my machine with 256 megs of RAM.
      That's right, it's pretty bad. (And don't forget, you still have to POST, which takes a good 15 or 20 seconds on my machine.)

      But Windows also supports suspend-to-RAM, which is much more useful. Waking up from suspend-to-RAM only takes about three seconds. As long as you're confident that the machine will have power while it's suspended, there's no reason to hibernate.

      This is really more of a motherboard/chipset feature than an OS feature, by the way. Windows 98/2000 is just the only x86 OS that implements it.
      --

      MSK

    3. Re:Instant On isn't accurate. by Lonesmurf · · Score: 2

      Windows 2000 seems to have a feature called hibernate. This is what it does. It dumps all your memory to harddisk, sets up windows so when you restart it loads that file back into memory (i guess that it's some sort of image) and then it shuts down the machine completely. When the box gets turned back on, windows loads the image and you are right where you were when you left.

      There are two main problems with this:

      1) If you have a lot of memory (I think NT supports what? A terabyte of memory?), then you have to have the equivalent in disk space -- more or less, I don't know if the file is compressed or not.

      2)It still takes idiot windows2000 30+ seconds to boot up on my machine with 256 megs of RAM. (I think this is related to point 1. However, I don't dare run the beast from redmond on a machine with less than 256 megs.)

      Nice idea, poorly implemented. I don't see why they can't use some of that leverage that they have over the industry to add a feature to the MoBo which allows the computer to turn off for the most part, but allow enough power to keep the memory the way it was. Feasable? I have no idea. Cool? Perhaps.

      I never shut down the machine anyways. :)

      Rami James
      Pixel Pusher
      ALST R&D Center, IL

      --

      rJames.org - illustration
  4. Re:Instant on? - BBC Micro..... by troc · · Score: 2

    It did have 64 but the assembler you mention above used the first 32 automatically and you couldn't change that, so for applications and whatnot you only had 32 available.

    The user port was cool and the excellent analogue joysticks when everyone else had clicky microswitch ones :)

    Troc

    --
    Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
  5. Re:two screen modes at once... by troc · · Score: 2

    Text adventures......

    god I remember getting well annoyed with The Hobbit.

    And buying books of computer games and typing them in......

    and one line scrollig games in 255 characters

    and citadel which took bloody hours to load off tape and wouldn't transfer to disc :(

    that's it, where's my duster. I can feel the need to play with the old beastie again (and I mean the BBC B :)

    On a weirder note, the British Science Museam has an Acorn Electron in the toechnology and communication section as "the shape of personal computing - soon we will have have computers like this at home" - slightly behind the times I feel.

    Troc

    --
    Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
  6. Re:I'll believe it when I see it by troc · · Score: 3

    Very true - what tends to happen is that in 5 years time, another technology, or a development of an existing technology has rendered the "amazing new breakthrough" obsolete (or too expensive, complex etc)

    These things tend to resurface a few years after they were invented or whatever and become part of technology anyway but without the fanfare and with a few people going "I told you so" and claiming 20/20 hindsight :)

    Things like holographic and/or 3D memory storage - was firsat mentioned well over a decade ago as the "next great thing" and was promptly forgotted and has recently resurfaced as working prototypes etc.

    Best thing to do is take it with a pinch of salt and wait a few years.

    I also like the fact that you can read the submission at the top of the page as indicating an awesome instant-on device that takes 5 years to power up :)

    Hohum

    troc

    --
    Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
  7. Re:Instant on? - BBC Micro..... by PhilHibbs · · Score: 2

    And the best "bitty box" it was too. It had a built in assember, the "user" port was one of the most generic expansion ports I've ever seen, you could plug a write-protectable ram cartridge into one of the ROM slots and write your own ROMs, wow! Those were the days. It only had 32k, though, not 64. The later machines had 128k, but it wasn't easy to access.

  8. A couple more by PD · · Score: 2

    Apparently in 5 years we will have computers. [1939]

    Apparently in 5 years I will have a computer. [me, in 1977]

    Anyway, we're going to have super mega fast computers in 5 years, with super mega capacity hard drives, and awesome color.

    If you compare computers of 5 years ago you'll find that they were all 486's which from a user's perspective were frustratingly slow. Even Linux, speedy as it was on that hardware, wasn't super fast because the hardware wasn't up to it.

    Nowadays, everything on my Linux box happens instantaneously, and I have absolutely no desire for a faster computer.

    The gains of the next 5 years will therefore mean less to me than the gains of the last 5 years.

    If there is some real change in my computing experience, it will be because we've crossed some magical gap that allows a new technology.

    I've been reading for years about how speech interfaces were just around the corner, and that the new 386 processors would have the horsepower to do it and blah blah blah. Every year it was always just around the corner.

    I think really good speech recognition will still take at least 5-10 years, and will require machines at least 10, probably 100 times faster than my Celery 300A machine. Until then, I just don't need a bigger box!

    --
    If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
  9. Re:What's the point? by Graymalkin · · Score: 2

    Have you ever used Linux? If you want JUST boot the kernel and bash you can load up in a few seconds, if you want to load any deamons or apps that let you do something it takes as much time as Windows to boot. Instant on computers are stuff like terminals although an instant on workstation would be pretty cool. Your stability atgument is stupid, the OS means shit if your programs aren't programmed well, a shoddy Linux app is as bad as a shoddy Windows app. Boot up time for an app is agregate so after a while the time builds up to a loass of productivity. In the course of a year you'd make back hours if not days worth of productivity if you could have a program open the instant you needed it. Stop being a "me too" weiner.

    --
    I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  10. Re:What's the point? by Graymalkin · · Score: 2

    Booting up a kernel is nothing, start in run level 3 on an older system that only has about 32 megs of ram and you'll see the advantages of having an instant on system. If your system boots up a GUI and deamons, that is considered part of the system. Stability is a moot point, depending on what you do or don't do can definitely affect system stability. You can run Windows 98 for days if you're keen and know how to manage it (Wintop works great for killing hung apps). I wouldn't want to spend days in Win 98 but it is possible. Booting isn't an issue if you store your system in a FlashROM and can hit a power button and get to work. GO down to Circuit City and play with an i-Opener demo, flick the power on and off a few times and you'll see what I'm talking about.

    --
    I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  11. You don't get it by Graymalkin · · Score: 3

    Linux weiners tout never having to reboot a system because their OS is oh so stable. Big efing deal. My file server's been up for a week and will probably stay up until I decide I want to upgrade the kernel. This is totally beyond the point of instant-on computers. It would be rad to have a computer with 10 gigs of ram that all your stuff was on, that way you'd have little seek time and could turn the system on and off like a television. Why is this cool? Because some people don't like leaving computers on all the time, in many places eletricity can be pretty pricy at certain times of the year or they may just not want to have their electrical toys running 24/7. Instant on would be great in a corporate environment because you'd get to save time waiting for stuff to start, that time builds up in the course of a year costing you cash. Home users also wouldn't have to deal with boot-ups which they may or may not understand. Oh well.

    --
    I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
  12. Non-obviousness is the wrong criteria for patents by Error+Spelling · · Score: 2
    Note that the stuff described above has all been fairly straightforward evolution of the hardware and software technology. The revolutionary part has been its effect on us all.

    I think you are right to question the revolutionary nature of individual technologies. Nature doesn't move in quantum leaps, only in a continuum, and by nature I mean to include human artifice. It follows that patents should not be granted on the grounds of non-obviousness because every invention, regardless of its complexity, will owe a large debt to the past.

    A better solution might be to extend the notion of usefulness in judging patentability by placing a large burden on applicant to show that his or her invention benefits human existence in some fairly significant way. This may still suffer from some vagueness, but at least it promises some payback for granting exclusive rights to work that incorporates the benefits of past discoveries without due compensation.

  13. Persistant state computing by mjg · · Score: 2

    This idea of persistant memory is interesting when combining with something like EROS, which is designed to be a persistant system. I don't see how it works well for current systems - the article makes references to not having to wait for the computer to reboot if it crashes... Except with current systems, you'd need to reload a lot of stuff in RAM anyway, because it would've been corrupted by the crash...

    I remember a little hack on the Amiga (Fastboot?) which was nearly instant-on. It dumped a copy of your memory to disk, and would just pull that memory image back into memory upon boot... So you could boot the machine in the time it took to pull owever many megs of RAM you had off of hard disk. It certainly had it's share of problems, but it was interesting to play with... Windows 98's suspend to disk mode is pretty similar, although I haven't actually played with that. Still, it certainly sounds like a nice technology for things like MP3 players and palmtop type computers, if nothing else.

  14. Re:Instant on == instant problems by Xenu · · Score: 2
    If you pull the plug, the state of memory is retained, but the CPU state is lost.

    Some older systems (PDP-11) support a power-fail interrupt that allows the CPU to save any volatile state information in core (non-volatile) memory. I don't know if any PC hardware supports this.

  15. Bubble Memory ? by scrutty · · Score: 2
    Anyone else remember bubble memory from the 80's ?

    That was magnetic based and non-volatile and I seem to recall it being used in a series of portables from some manufacturor like Sharp.

    I've got a nagging feeling that one of the reasons it didn't take off was access speed. I wonder if this new approach is at all similar, and if so what they have done about any performance issues.

    I mean if it required dirty great RAM cacheing to make the performance acceptable surely this would be a reinvention of the hard disk ?( joke )

    --
    -- Oh Well
    1. Re:Bubble Memory ? by hedgehog_uk · · Score: 2

      We still really need something like this. A cheap, persistent memory would be perfect for devices like digital cameras and mp3 players, where access speed is much less important than capacity and cost. Perhaps if bubble memory hadn't been killed it would now be fulfilling it's potential.

      HH

      Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.

      --
      Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
      She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
    2. Re:Bubble Memory ? by EntropyMechanic · · Score: 3
      The problem with bubble memory was that it was serial. All the bits were stored as little magnetic domains, but the only way to read those domains were to actually shift them to a particular part of the IC where special circutry existed to read them. The domain storage was logically laid out linearly, and as I recall, the domains could only be shifted in 1 direction due to the physical layout of the IC used to hold them. Thus, if you read a byte and then tried to read it again, all the domains that composed the bits in that byte had to be shifted around the entire domain storage array again.

      Now while a lot could have been done with caching and using multiple domain storage arrays, bubble memories were serial devices and their latencies just would not scale up well as you added more bits to them. Bubbles would make a good NV storage device, but could never replace RAM.

      Bubble memories were introduced in the late 70's, I believe. I think their big failure was lack of storage space and speed. Their commercial death knell was the ramp-up of HDD storage capacities in the mid-80's. They did have the benefit of having no moving parts and I think a military hardened version was available. If they exist at all any more, I'm sure it's just in a few niches.

      JTS

      Baldric, you wouldn't know a cunning plan if it painted itself purple and danced around on a harpsichord singing 'cunning plans are here again' - Lord Edmund Blackadder

      --
      Remove uppercase letters from my email address
  16. Re:Irrelivant by barzok · · Score: 2
    So what you're saying is that you will accept less stability if th reboots take less time? I don't think so. In my world, downtime is downtime, and no matter how short the downtime is, it takes away from my productivity. Or worse, takes away from the productivity of my clients.

    I'll gladly accept a 5-minute reboot cycle if I have to do it once every couple months, during off hours. A 1-minute reboot cycle (let's be realistic about this, it will never be "instant," especially with certain OSes) in the middle of quarter-end or year-end processing is A Big Deal.

  17. Persistent operation systems by srn_test · · Score: 4
    This sort of thing is what the persistent operating system groups have been working on doing for years.

    It turns out that it's _hard_ to do - keeping the data around is the easy part; what do you do when the OS crashes? How do you recover?

    You end up with a huge database like wrapper around the entire OS, and really heavy-weight recovery code to try to rebuild a consistent state of the system.

    You've also got the problem that if something is wrong in the OS, when you reboot you'll quite possibly just trigger the same bug again! Makes Microsoft style "reboot to fix the problem" solutions not so good.

    See some persistent OS sites, like:

    • http://www.psrg.cs.usyd.edu.au/
    • http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~aol/publicationlist.ht ml

    This is just a few I happen to know.

    Stephen

  18. How hard would it be to... by Shotgun · · Score: 2

    Modify Linux so that I hit a key combination that stored the current memory contents and CPU state to disk. Then modify lilo so that it would load the image to memory and reset the CPU to the current state.

    This way, I could load the programs I normally use and wouldn't have to wait for each to load each time I rebooted?

    Just one problem I can think of off hand, What to do with the state of devices, say a sound card, that are normally reset when the driver is loaded?

    --
    Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
    Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
  19. Irrelivant by CAIMLAS · · Score: 4
    Would an instant on computer not make computer pogram stability a near-useless feature? For me, loss of work isn't my fear through a crash - it's sitting their on my white skinny butt for X minutes while my machine reboots.

    I switched to linux to prevent that. (And to geek around more, but that's another story.) Would such a thing make Linux's main strong point null, or would linux be able to develop it's other fields - digital image/video editing, audio, games, workstation software - in time to surpass wintel products, on a quality based assessment alone?

    -------
    CAIMLAS

    --
    ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
  20. Re:Instant on == instant problems by interiot · · Score: 2
    re-entrancy problems

    Checkpoint the memory periodically?


    MIB problem

    Have another key sequence that wipes all of your still-semi-volatile memory?


    --

  21. Instant on == instant problems by wowbagger · · Score: 4
    I see two different but related problems with a system composed entirely of non-volatile memory:
    1. If you pull the plug, the state of memory is retained, but the CPU state is lost. This is very much akin to an interrupt occurring, except that an interrupt at least records the CPU state on the stack. The problem is that you now have to protect everything from re-entrancy problems: otherwise when the system is abruptly powered off and restarted the CPU has to do a restart and system or application data structures may be in a non-reenterable state.
    2. If the memory is corrupted, how do you force the system to clear? You'd need a [button|keysequence|etc.] that would tell the system to do a complete coldstart & purge of memory.

    Also, this could be bad if the Men In Black (and I don't mean division 6) kick in your door. Anything in system memory will be in system memory "and may be used against you in court", whether you like it or not. You won't be able to just yank the plug and clear system memory.

    That said, I still think this will be wonderful in the main. It's just going to have some implications we'll need to think about.

    --
    www.eFax.com are spammers
  22. Someone's done that... by Greyfox · · Score: 2

    I've seen some code floating around somewhere to do just that. When you use it, it causes Linux to effectively go into suspended hibernation. When you reboot, you get the entire state back. Wish I could remember where I saw it. If you poke around on the Linux high availability sites, you might turn it up.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  23. Re:Questions I have... by Greyfox · · Score: 2
    Q1: That would just be stupid, wouldn't it?

    Q2: I'm hoping that doesn't happen in my lifetime.

    Q3: See Q1.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  24. Instant-on... by Greyfox · · Score: 2

    My computer's already instant on. I just scoot on over and hit the monitor button. I run Linux so I can get away with that. The only time I ever reboot is to swap the kernel out.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  25. No... by Greyfox · · Score: 3

    If your OS crashes or becomes unstable you'll probably have to jump through some hoops to zero out all your RAM. So it'll only be instant-on if your system remains stable. This should increase, not decrease, the demand for a stable OS. One which doesn't allow programs to take the OS with it.

    --

    I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?

  26. In five years.. by Lonesmurf · · Score: 3

    Apparently, in five years, we will have 1 Terabyte solid-state harddrives, instant memory (what? 10ns is too long??), 1 bazillion GHz processor rings, and video cards that will spit out realtime images straight into our fucking brains, all running on 1 Petabyte networks.. within our homes. Oh ya, I may have forgotten to mention that all this will be free.. all supported by a little blinking banner on your desktop that you will mentally block out after a week of using the machine.

    Then again, the way software is moving, I may need this to play Quake |||(|)||| on my BloatedLinux(tm) ver.100.3.2 system.

    I'll believe this stuff when I see it.

    Rami James
    Pixel Pusher
    ALST R&D Center, IL
    --

    --

    rJames.org - illustration
  27. Re:Shouldn't be called MRAM by tc · · Score: 2

    RAM == Random Access Memory. This stuff is random access, and looks like memory to me. It's also solid-state, fast, and magnetic. So MRAM seems a perfectly reasonable acronym. What's the problem?

  28. Computer time.. by luckykaa · · Score: 2

    5 years down the line is used because computer time schedules saturate at 5. Nobody would start a major project if there were no returns for the next 5 years. Therefore 5 = infinity. 5 - 4.9999 = 5.

    Medicine seems to set infinity at 10 years.

  29. This same story was covered on /. a few days ago by jeff_bond · · Score: 2

    This is a redundant story. In this slashdot article the same magnetic memory technology is dicussed.

    Jeff

    --
    stty erase ^H
  30. Instant Access? by spoonboy42 · · Score: 2

    As far as I can tell, the memory does NOT support "Instant Access". The main feature of MRAM is that it always retains it's content, plus it has very low power consumption. There is nothing to indicate that it's access times will be any less than DRAM (particularly DRAM in five years).

    --
    Anonymous Luddite: "What do you think of the dehumanizing effects of the Internet?"
    Andy Grove: "Not Much."
  31. Doesn't make any sense by muzzy · · Score: 4

    ... could make all of our computers instant-on! Problem is, 5 years is a long time to wait...

    I don't think 5 years is really "instant-on", this story is contradicting itself.

    --
    -- Matti Nikki
  32. Looking through the archives . . . by streetlawyer · · Score: 5

    Apparently, in five years, we will have multi-gigabyte hard disk drives, a global network of computers, we'll be able to transmit 58.8Kb over voice telephone netowkrs, wireless data networks and x86 chips running at 300MHz will be cheap. Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it [1995]

    Apparently, in five years, we'll all have Xerox PARC style desktop environments, hard disk size will be so big we'll be able to forget about our archive of floppies and we'll have moving pictures on our PCs. Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. [1990]

    Apparently, in five years, we'll all have affordable IBM computers with hard disk drives in our homes. And we'll all be walking round with mobile telephones. Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. [1985]

    Apparently in five years, we'll all have over 512K of RAM and we'll be able to do graphics on desktop computers. {Note: I remember hearing someone around this time talk about a "gigabyte" as if it were an obviously made-up word or at best, a whimsical extension of "kilobyte"}. Yeah, I'll believe it when I see it. [1980]

    [....]

    "I can see a global market for maybe five computers"

    --


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