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Instant Access Memory
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..."
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
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:
This is just a few I happen to know.
Stephen
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?
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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
I don't think 5 years is really "instant-on", this story is contradicting itself.
-- Matti Nikki
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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