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Magnetic RAM from IBM
n8willis writes "ZDNet has an article about IBM's latest breakthrough, Magnetic RAM (MRAM) that actually works. The story is a bit fluffy, rolling out every possible buzzword (eg, wireless video will now be feasible due to faster RAM technology???), but the tech - in development since 1974 - is indeed going into production as we speak. Gotta hand it to IBM these days: copper interconnects, 200ppi LCD monitors and now this." I'll believe it when I can read/write from it.
Geez, from the questions here, such as "How will this affect my floppies/other media/hardware?" and "how will this be affected by my monitor/speakers?"
I must only presume that none of you has ever heard of shielding.
*GOOD* quality speakers and monitors (not the $20 speakers from compusa) have shielding that minimize the magnetic energy escaping the equipment. place your cheapo speakers against your monitor. if it affects the monitor image, then you know you bought crap.
If things are properly shielded, you won't have interference or suffer any negative effects.
Geez, you don't overclock without proper cooling, why would you think of using a magnetic storage media without shielding?
(course, now all the tin foil hat freaks will come out and claim they were right all along....)
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Magnetic RAM, MRAM, is a non volatile memory with unlimited read and write cycles. It also has the potential
...being refreshed over 15,000 times per second!
to be very fast, and very dense.
Virtually all products that involve digital electronics (which includes just about everything these days: computers,
cellular phones, but also household appliances like washers, dryers, microwave ovens, refrigerators, and entertainment
devices like televisions, CD players, VCR's...) need memory. The choice of memory has historically involved a tradeoff.
Non volatile memories (memories that hold the information whether or not power is supplied) like EEPROM's can be
expensive and may have long term reliability problems - you can read and write to them only so many times or cycles
before you degrade the ability of the memory to "remember".
Volatile memories (memories that hold the information only if power is supplied) can be static RAM's or dynamic RAM's.
SRAM's (static RAM's) consume a lot less power than DRAM'S (dynamic RAM's), but take up a lot more chip area for a
given memory size, so are a lot more expensive. Because cost is generally the driving force in electronics, DRAM's
tend to have the highest volume of sales...they are the lowest cost, but consume a lot more power. In fact, to get the
density in a DRAM, we use a simple capacitor as the memory device. A charge on the capacitor can represent a "1"
and no charge can represent a "0". However, over time, the charge leaks off....losing all the information. To avoid this,
the DRAM must be REFRESHED. Essentially, a REFRESH cycle involves reading all the information out, and then putting it
all back in. Looking at a data sheet for a DRAM, the example has the 64 Meg DRAM needing to be refreshed every 64
msec
That refresh cycle on the DRAM explains the much greater power consumption of the less expensive DRAM compared
to the more expensive SRAM. While it may not be typical, a quick browsing through data sheets found a 64 M DRAM
that consumed 1 Watt of power, and a 64 M SRAM that consumed less than 400 mW.
An MRAM can have the density of a DRAM...and since cost goes with density, it is possible that an MRAM can have a
cost that is competitive with a DRAM...but it will have much lower power consumption...effectively zero power
consumption in the standby mode, which is the mode the memory spends most of its time in.
The MRAM doesn't require the refresh of a DRAM, and has the nonvolatility of a EEPROM, but has reliability superior to
the EEPROM. So, an MRAM may be able to replace DRAM's, SRAM's. amd EEPROM's, without involving any major
compromise or tradeoff.
It is hard to judge the improvement in the battery life of a cellular phone. With digital cellular phones used just
sporadically for voice phone calls, the battery life now is very good, but might perhaps be doubled with an MRAM - this
is just my guess, and may be way off. If the digital cellular phone is heavily used for phone calls, the power
consumption involved in sending the signal out would tend to dominate over the impact of improved power
consumption in the memory, and the impact on battery life might be minimal.
However, future applications of wireless products like the cellular phone include adding more functionality beyond
voice calls. For communication products, MRAM may make it possible to have access to the internet with the ability to
get video in addition to data and voice.
The concept of a storage hierarchy for computers goes well beyond just main memory and hard drives. For example, on the smaller/faster end of things there are SRAM caches on chips and motherboard; on the bigger/slower end of things there are tape and CD backups. I think that though it is tempting for a programmer to throw out the storage hierarchy ("Everything is fast and big! Yay!"), they are with us to stay and serve a verry useful purpose.
Ben
Will this memory be susceptible to magnetic interference from ordinary magnetic sources?
(*Imagine*)
The SmartFridge(tm)... A billion dollar effort by GE brings you a Fridge that remembers what you put in and take out, generates shopping lists for your agent software, and doesn't open after midnight.
*enter a small child*
"Oooh, this magnet stick to the fridge!"
(future engineer here)
SmartFridge orders 10lbs of Guacamole because its megnetic memory is scrambled like the eggs you can't have for breakfast because of the former.
Yes it is. No it's not the first magnetic memory, that predates Honeywell's 1997 efforts too. But it is the first to use the particular technology involved (Magnetic Tunnel Junctions).
1) It's integrated. Cores were a whole lot of tiny magnetic donuts, threaded into a two or D array by wires passing through the center holes. In most cases, three wires were used per core, X and Y selects and Read Out. Core memory arrays were enormous and they cost dollars per bit -- a small college I was attending in 1972 had ONE computer with just 16K-bytes of core memory. It sounds like IBM has worked out a way to grow the magnetic material and the read and write circuits on a chip--smaller and cheaper. (Whether it will ever be small and cheap enough to compete with other forms of non-volatile memory -- battery-backed static CMOS, EEPROM, and Flash -- is questionable. Let alone competing with DRAM, which would be necessary for many of those predictions in the article to come true.)
2) In the 1970's there wasn't a good way to read a constant magnetic field electronically. So what they did for readout was to send out the erase (write 0) signals on the X,Y wires. If a core was 1, this caused a pulse on the Read wire. After reading, it had to write the data back. Now, there are silicon sensors that can directly read out a magnetic field, so I assume that IBM is building these into the chips and you don't have to erase to read.
3. Power and interface requirements: It took a lot of power to write to those cores. Because of the erase-to-read, it took just as much to read them. They were low power only when you didn't use them. So the wire drivers had to use higher voltages than solid-state logic devices can handle, requiring level-changing interface circuits. The article doesn't say, but I would assume that the MRAM has much smaller magnetic thingies, requiring little power to switch, and can run at normal voltages.
I agree that it is a scenario unlikely to ever happen, but it has many problems like the one I've mentioned, should the appropriate "perfect" storage technology ever arise. These problems offer us insight into how other things work, and their solutions would perhaps help us predict and design things better in the long term.
That should be a pretty easy problem to solve. Just initialize a chip that can reset the RAM to 0. This isn't a very complicated process, it just needs to index every address and set it to 0. Since the power button is used to turn it on and off, one could have it set up so that if a user holds the power button down for 4 seconds, the motherboard will resets it's memory. Or, you could simply design a memory reset switch. Not a big deal.
Uhm 256 sounds pretty crappy considering they don't expect mainstream production for 10 years. By that time 256 meg will be meaningless. The average amount fo ram today is like 64 to 128 meg. it will only be about a year or two until the average is 256. In ten years i wiouldn't be surprised fi the average RAM per computer is like 2 gig.
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
IBM announced a colabrative effort with the US DOE to develop a "reactionless space drive" based on thier new MRAM technology. The idea came about when casing vibrations were observed during photoshop benchmarking of computers equiped with MRAM. Brokehaven researchers are modeling the effect in order to determine the optimum layout of memory slots for propelling laptops, spacecraft etc.
I hope this puts an end to Rambus, their patents, and their royalties very, very soon. I sure hope someone's had the foresight to keep MRAM patents out of the grubby little hands of Rambus.
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
This is like MS claiming to have invented a new technology when they came out with their "optical mouse".
Well, they did. All previous optical mice required grids. Microsoft's mouse uses a camera and software capable of comparing images very quickly to determine speed and direction. A far cry from grid-based optical mice.
"And like that
The cool part is that it works by wiggling atoms around in the crystal structure:
... an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain ... -- T. Jefferson
Well, rebooting them would return those servers to their frozen state right after the POST tests. That is, if the reason they reboot is because the NT boxes crashed and not because the NT administrators were told that it's good for the machine to reboot it every day or two ;).
Monkey sense
I'll believe it when I can read/write from it.
:)
And he does not mean with a pen.
IBM recently announced their astonishing, new, unprecedented breakthrough in MAGNETIC memory that ACTUALLY WORKS, (some old industry wags are referring to it as core, for some unknown reason). Shortly afterward, they announced a startling new breakthrough method of storing data by punching holes in cards, a development no doubt inspired by the efficient vote tabulations in Florida.
include $sig;
1;
Speech recognition requires fast access to the memory and to the processer. Any speed bump in that chain decreases performance of the recognition at hand.
Remove the weakest link in the chain, and all memory speed-reliant applications will improve, until the applications are re-written to heavily tax the new capabilities of the memory.
That's what you weren't seeing. That, and IBM is infatuated with speech recognition (via voice for linux? it's available from alphaworks if you run a JDK.)
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
I think they are trying to indicate how faster memory will make things like these work faster. They are probably trying to put things in perspective for the "common man". If they were trying to drum up interest, they should have said something like: "Hey, this will let you download more porn much faster!"
The thing is, if this takes ten years before it gets to the point that this memory is cheap enough for widespread use (like it says in the article), then there will probably be something else with similar functionality already in place, and the whole thing will go the way of 8-track tapes.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Wired had an article about this a few months back too... cool tech. Search the online archive.
-k
Then again, if it takes them 10 years to get this out, their patent will be almost up. :)
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
D%$#it! spintronics.com is already registered.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
a jointpress release which says "[IBM and MRAM partner Infineon Technologies AG] believe MRAM products could be available commercially as soon as 2004."
Moderators, come on! This is not insightfull.
MRAM won't be available soon, so the dilemna between RDRAM and DDRAM will be long forgotten.
An Amulet processor while having very low power consumption (no clock) is not very powerfull so in a few years it would look very underpowered for a laptop, maybe a PDA would be a better place.
Who cares about the need of a new motherboard, you wont see this until many years!
you are a bad-grammar poo poo head.
It also minimizes the chance for getting the crap kicked out of you if your attacker knows that his potential victim is armed.
Well, they did. All previous optical mice required grids. Microsoft's mouse uses a camera and software capable of comparing images very quickly to determine speed and direction. A far cry from grid-based optical mice.
Yes it was a breakthrough, but it was invented not by Microsoft, but by Gary Gordon at HP Labs. I hope Microsoft had to pay a lot for the right to not mention HP in all the publicity.
And worrying about if a new motherboard will be needed in two years is insightfull??
And if you believe the release-date of new product like this, then I have a bridge to sell to you.
I don't care at all about this moderation system if you want to know.
One of the biggest bottlenecks on the internet occurs with routers and switches. Routers require very high speed memory. I imagine that having higher speed memory could increase the bandwidth of routers significantly, which, as a result will help to speed up the internet.
Not no power consumption. No power consumption when not reading or writing data. And that isn't even 100% sure, it may need sense and positiong circuits powered up for any sort of acceptable memory access time. For all we know the actual power needed to read and write may be far more then DRAM (or far less).
We don't know what kind of memory this thing will actually replace until there is more info on operating power/speed/tempature, and storage tempature/duration, and density, and sheilding required (which is effectavly density).
This could be the next DRAM, or the next FLASH, or just the next Bubble Memory.
Well, if you're running a basic workstation (that is, nobody needs 24/7 remote access to it), You can save a fair chunk of energy by powering down your system without losing system state--a fair step up from current suspend methods, which basically need to write the contents of RAM to disk and then read and reinstate said contents to RAM (which can be a tricky/time consuming proposition.) Extend this tech to other components (processor, periphrials, etc) and you could eventually have a truly persistent-state computer, where the concept of "powering off" falls by the wayside, as power is simply siphoned when needed; since your computer wouldn't need a constant flow of electricity to maintain state, it could effectively draw zero power in an when idle, thus being (theoretically) as effecient as if it were off.
So basically, in the short term, snapping the power on and off when you finish using the computer becomes a quick, simple thing to do. If you get a little visionary with this, you may not even need a power switch on your computer eventually. Funky thought, huh?
$ man reality
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
My guess is that all computers equipped with this type of memory are going to have a hardware reset switch in case of crashes/freezes.
Looks like Apple was ahead of their time again B-)
DB
...will it need shielding?
This is nothing new, they were called CORES, and they've been around since the '70s!!!
This is like MS claiming to have invented a new technology when they came out with their "optical mouse".
Bubble RAM missed its window--other storage got bigger (in capacity) and faster not long after it came out. (Sort of like the "floptical"--I have one of those, wanna buy it? It's a big 20 Mbytes; I got along with a 20 M hard drive on my CoCo for a long time. :-)
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Of course, it would help for normal shutdown or for sleepy laptops, but it is not the end-all/be-all of quick reboots.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
It actually seems like these things will be usable. 256mb for initial runs don't sound too shabby.
I'm a little curious on the size of them. The mention all the wireless buzz words, but no size estimates for the actual devices.
Most electronics up until now work within the charge domain. That is, devices all deal with moving, changing, transferring, etc, electric charge and the lack of electric charge. Amplifiers, for instance, can amplify current, which is the flow of charge, or voltage, which is the energy/charge ratio. Semiconductors exploit all kinds of funky physics to do these things.
However, there's a whole other degree of freedom of the electron that's virtually unused. Spin. In any elementary quantum mechanics course you'll learn rather soon on that electrons are Fermions with total spin 1/2, which means there are two spin states an electron can be in, usually called spin-up and spin-down.
So the new world of spintronics aims at manipulating the spin of the electrons, instead of the charge. Spin is a different beast than charge, in that it can be manipulated by magnetic fields and light, in vastly-different ways than does charge flow. Spin is a fundamental nature of angular momentum, so whereby the total charge is conserved within a small sample, so too is the angular momentum.
Some of these MRAM's were specifically mentioned yesterday, in that the parity of the spin can be used to store bits. One nice fact about this could be that information isn't lost if power is turned off, unlike DRAM's and many SRAM's.
It's a VERY new field, spintronics. I did a search on Google last night for only 'spintronics' and only 665 sites were listed. It's been around for a few years so far, but there have been problems with finding the right magnetic materials. You need the right combination of ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic layers, and certain ways to test materials, before you can really start doing some good stuff. However, materials are starting to be found, so it's an exciting time for this potentially huge field.
Hopefully soon there'll be spin-like transistors, leading to spin amplifiers, and all sorts of other goodies. Sorry I don't have any specifics about this, but I just found out about it yesterday.
make world, not war
Instant on? Of course. Think about. Saving all of the startup files and bootloader in the ram, that will store information all the time. How could it losse power? It wont. It doesn't need an electric charge to store the bits in the ram, so will hold, in theroy, for ever. This is a huge breakthrough. And the amount of mem it could hold in one chip could easily be much higher then the 256MB that the early chips will run. Think about having 1GB of RAM on your home machine with just one chip, that will boot up your machine instantly and will never losse the information stored in the memory if your power get's cut off from not paying the electric company :) awwww, that will be sweat.
:)
And yes, faster surfing and faster downloads as well. The high-end servers will be able to store (or cache) the file's its serving up in the lighting fast memory. It will access the memory faster than a scsi raid getting thousands of hits per minute, or even per second.
And I'm SURE that the chips will be shielded, so you dont need to worry if it will wipe out your hard drive or floppy when its turned on. I would think that IBM wouldn't be THAT stupid
--we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams.
--we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dreams.
Billy
You can find an article on Stuart Parkin (also developer of the GMR head in your hard-drive) who is the lead scientist on this project at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/mram.html
Ok, those devices are out there since years. Ok, it's not something actually new.
..So what?
If it works and is cheap enough to be put everywhere, wouldn't that be nice? Technology may sometimes be useful, what's wrong in that?
I'm just hoping it won't be vaporware, again.
anybody has any idea if the cost of producing such a chip would be to high compared to 'regular' ram?
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
http://www.technews.com/news/00/159086.html
"The speed increase is thanks to subtle a twist on the solid-state memory technology that has driven computers for almost for decades. The technology is known as interlocked pipelined CMOS (complimentary metal oxide semiconductor) and will allow memory chips to reach speeds - in theory, at least - of between 3.3 gigahertz (GHz) and 4.5 GHz, using conventional silicon transistors. "
"The key to the new technology is a distributed "clock" function. In computer chips, the clock paces the speed of the circuits. Standard designs use a centralized clock to synchronize the operations of an entire chip, ensuring that all operations run at the same interval, or cycle. The clock waits for all the operations on a chip to finish before starting the next cycle, so the speed of the entire chip is limited to the pace of the slowest operation. To increase the speed, the IBM researchers decentralized the clock, using locally generated clocks to run smaller sections of circuits. Infineon says that it is working closely with IBM's New York Fishkill research operation on developing MRAM technology still further, with the intention of allowing the memory chips to function like bubble memory, which retails the computer data, even when power is removed from the chipset. "
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
The point was speech recognition on cell phones, presumably because these MRAM chips are so tiny and energy efficient that you can cram 256 megs into a phone. I'm baffled by the "easier downloads" thing though... maybe MRAM will we very very fast, speeding up computers in general....
Or its just marketing crap. One Best Buy ad for an HP with a Pnetium IV claimed that MP3 downloads would go faster on the new chip....
---- I made the Kessel Run in under 11 parsecs.
Add to that the death of the Aptiva series and the 75GB 7200RPM Deskstar, and you have a nice company. Now if only they could ditch Avery Brooks... "When, after six years, you finally realize that DS9 was just a pathetic Star Trek offshoot and that no one was watching it; that is an epiphany."
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
My statement to IBM is this: Before you release this "MRAM" technology, develop a shielding strategy for it.
Boy, it's a good thing you brought that issue up. I'm sure IBM's top engineers didn't even think of it!
;)
- MFN
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Magnetic charge? If turning on your monitor creates magnetic charge, I know a lot of people who would be very happy to meet you. They've been searching for magnetic monopoles for a long time, and haven't found any yet.
They are already at the same level as Bell Labs and i think they are nearly as old. Personally i'de say they are the two most imrpessive private research firms. They are the only computer companies that can claim nobel prizes. Here is a list of the years in which each was one. The only one which is actually related to computers is Bell's 1956 award for the discovery fo the transistor. Bell: 1988,1978,1977,1956 IBM: 1987,1986,1973
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
Yes, it is a catchy buzzword, but at least it's an applicable one.
make world, not war
Me too, me too!!! My mama told me I could be a GangBanger too when I grow up! I just love shooting people for the fun of of it. I works much better than common Sence
You silly Poo Poo head
Does this mean that main memory and mass storage can now merge on the same medium? So essentially your filesystem IS your memory. The heap/stack/whatever is just located in some separate protected area. This would mean entirely redesigning the vast majority of operating systems which were designed to optimize the exact problem of memory/disk space usage, protection, etc. All of a sudden "disk cache", DMA, binary loaders, etc. are all history. Memory fragmentation and disk fragmentation are now the same thing. Anyway, sounds really cool. However, 256 MB mass storage is pretty damn small, and will be even orders of magnitude smaller 10 years from now. They better be able to ramp that number up.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
My statement to IBM is this: Before you release this "MRAM" technology, develop a shielding strategy for it.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Will MRAM be regarded as a breakthrough in 4 years? If they could ship it NOW, it would. Especially the non-volatile feature rocks, but I am pretty cautious to jump this train: wasn't there some company that promised a kind of optical RAM made of polymeres with access times around 5ns?
According to the press release issued by IBM, "IBM Research pioneered development of a miniature component called the 'magnetic tunnel junction' as early as 1974, eventually adapting it as a means to store information and to build a working MRAM chip in 1998." So, while magnetic field lines have been around since quite some time before 1974, IBM developed the technology to make small, efficient RAM chips possible using magnetism.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
As soon as your hard drive spins up, all information is erased!
Back to the old drawing board.
The above post is an editorial, the poster cannot and will not be held responsible for all or in part for it's contents
something like... television?
This
Yeah..but how MUCH sheilding? I could just imagine a couple of crazy kids driving through silicon valley with a huge electromagnate mounted on their car. What if I have my computer in a machine shop? What then? Do I have to specify how much sheilding I want in the online store? Do my costs get jacked accordingly? Just my 2 cents.
Mask
Ramtron has been making Ferroelectric RAM's for years. It is a non-volatile RAM. It has unlimited life. I am curious how this is any different.
Yes. Take a look at Walkmans. Those are still around after a long while. People still use them every day. Casette decks are still in almost every car sold. And how's this, something even earlier, the RADIO. Yeah, people still use those. Imagine that.
Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Linux is only free if your time is of no value
Be in Your Senses
I'll believe it when I C it.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Every "new" technology is claimed to improve "the web experience" these days. The addition of the speech recognition is just because it was IBM they were talking about (they love speech recognition). Personally, I think anyone with a clue know that what's holding back the "web experience" is that we don't have fat enough pipes yet. I don't care if you buy the latest and greatest PIII (or I guess it's PIV now), if you stick a 56k modem in there (that can actually only connect at 23.5k) you are not going to massively increase the speed of downloads over that old Pentium 133 with the same modem.
Sorry, that's a little pet peeve of mine. Taking advantage of the computer clueless should be outlawed. But that would mean arresting every marketing idiot, er I mean genius, in the industry.
------------
If I bought an Imac I wouldn't need that floppy... Now if they only fit with my current dimm's
1980's - 1 k SRAM chips VS 32K and 64K bubble memory. 256 K and 512 K was projected.
:-)
Now...how did this all turn out for Intel?
Memtech bought out all of Intel's patents/technology. They are no longer being made by memtech, however they will repair them for you
Will IBM fare better? If the goal is to target servers with 256 mb chips, I wouldn't go out and buy IBM stock based on this revelation. I'm sure this technology has a place in the market, I just don't share the optimisim of the ZD author of this RAM being a server RAM replacement.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The thought of not having to wait for some of the servers here to reboot is even more appealing.
Why should you not have to wait for your servers to reboot? If your servers reboot because of power failures (in which case I'd advice a UPS ;) then there is still the issue of fsck and mount that renders the RAM useless, if your server reboot because new hardware is added.. then you still need to reboot because you need to install a new kernel, if your machine crashes then a reboot won't help much, etc.
Monkey sense
And I almost forgot, according to the IEEE, The IBM 305 RAMAC was the first disk memory system.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
It helps with easier downloading because you are back up and running quicker after your browser causes windows to crash :)
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Good call. In 10 years, I'm sure that 256mb of RAM will be just enough for the average pocket calculator. The ammount of RAM in my home machine has gone up by about a factor of 100 in the last decade.
-B
What's up with that, Taco? I feel that your personal preferences really affect your judgement. If Intel comes up with something new - well, they are doomed, it is vaporware, they'll delay, not deliver, blah-blah-blah.. If it is our big blue friend, wow.. let's congratulate them on the breakthrough, they are so awesome!
Be more reasonable. There used to be not much of a difference company-wise between IBM and Intel.. now they are like bad guy and good guy. :(
http://dtum.livejournal.com
Should be pretty fast. But I was wondering, won't Windows make a mess inside the RAM? Or any other OS for that matter...
It's fast and therefore the OS will only write to it whereever the pointer is at that moment. Right? ;)
Should pose quite a few problems with the read back. heh looks like Linus has more work coming up with this new technology!!
Hopefully the cost will be dramatically lower than SDRAM.... And BIGGER amounts of it too! :(
4 brackets * 256 = 1 Gb only...
"I did this cause Linux gives me a woody"
"I did this cuz Linux gives me a woody"
Yeah, if you like booting to the BSOD. I worked in a department with a bunch of crAptivas. 90% of the time the auto-resume choked on itself and I ended up having to wait for it to boot on top of the time it took to wait for the monitor to warm up to the BSOD. Maybe IBM should get their lousy existing OEM products working before they starting playing with new (old) technologies.
---- Just another spud server.
if this RAM is stable through a re-boot, what happens when your memory gets corrupted? All the sudden I'm in an infinite corrupted-ram circle. Do I just pass a big magnet over my computer to "reset" it? I know that works for Hard Drives ;)
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Maybe they mean "easier downloads" for the FBI once they've used the speech recognition software to make a text copy of your call.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I wonder if it will be very temprature sensitive and require a X-Y current curve run on it once in a while to calibrate the read currents like the good ole days of core memory?
The truth shall set you free!
Con:
What about magnetically shielding the hardware so that magnetic fields from other devices can't erase the memory?
Interestingly, the idea of uniform storage isn't used in humans. We have a short term and long term memory - which duals, at least in pedantic respects, that of RAM and magnetic media right now. It will be interesting to see how computers would evolve if all memory was addressable in the exact same direct (in terms of no buffer) mechanism.
New Scientist had an article on spintronics a while back (Feb 1998). Does a good job of explaining things.
Why should you not have to wait for your servers to reboot? If your servers reboot because of power failures (in which case I'd advice a UPS ;) then there is still the issue of fsck and mount that renders the RAM useless, if your server reboot because new hardware is added.. then you still need to reboot because you need to install a new kernel, if your machine crashes then a reboot won't help much, etc.
:(
I suppose I should elaborate. . . I'm not too worried about the various *nix servers we have here. It just seems our NT servers need to reboot every day or two. . .
What I don't understand is why this can't be achieved using EEPROMs or just regular old battery-powered NVRAM. I remember the old Macs used to have a great deal of the system on ROMSs ... why not take it to its logical conclusion and put all the libraries, kernel, system files, and for that matter OS applications on a ROM or EEPROM?
If the answer is that ROMs are slower than RAMs, can anyone explain why? I would think ROMs would be faster, not having to worry about writes...
Well, you have to think of this from a production standpoint. Today, 256MB technology is feasable. Maybe they don't yet have stable enough technology to produce a 1GB chip. You can't plan for something that doesn't work yet. Why not, then, produce a 1 terabyte chip for test purposes, spend millions of dollars, and in 2003 say, "oops, it doesn't work." We probably won't be seeing MRAM on the desktop for another 10 years anyway, which gives IBM plenty of time to develop a chip worthy of the times.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
Rambus claims to hold Magnetic Memory patent, will press IBM for licensing and royalties.
Microsoft invents Command Line Interpreter interface, says will replace Windows 2000
Shed 30 Lbs in time for the Holidays, with Linux powered dietary supplements!
Burroughs spins back out of Unisys, claims old taint associated with name forgotten.
HeathKit to introduce DNA Lab, l33t k1dd13s will be able to grow own dinos, munch San Diego, make bad movies.
OSX found to cause baldness in lab mice.
Black hole found forming in southern California desert, site said to contain Atari ET cartridges. Disney plans to use site for remake.
Warriors defeat Lakers, credit Buckminster Fuller for inspiration. "We kept thinking of them as Bucky balls and all the potential they encompass!"
Earth's moon actually stolen from Mars, water too!
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I have been asking the question "what will be the ultimate solution to the fact that digital is not true 1 to 1 compression/transfer in the audio world?" If this unlocked the mystery, I accept it with open arms. Maybe people, like me, will stop bitching about the fact that no matter how fast the sample rate is, it still ain't 1/1 like it is in magentic analogue world.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
I like that idea! 1TB would ROCK! I'd throw that in my server - it'd be fast enough, that the RAM disk I'd make would be HUGE, and I'd NEVER have another file space problem again! I'd never worry about loosing data either if they keep a persistant state! That would rock!
/dev/home dir on one of these... :-) (or a network share drive for you windows people.)
Imagine a
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/mram.html
void theoremProver(){
print "this product is correct"
}
>>Here's an article from Scientific American on the topic.
Which points out that the data density wasn't there, and that they were slow and expensive. Commercially available isn't what we're looking for: commercially viable is, and Honeywell's product clearly wasn't. Admittedly, it doesn't sound like IBM is going to be able to make them cheaply for quite some time either, but at least they have the access times down (or so it sounds--the article was a bit vague, as is ZDnet's want).
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
Sadly, with IBM's overly conservative estimates of "We won't have this in large scale production until after the next epoch" it's more torturous than vaporware.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
n0rk
I assume this is directed towards Rambus?
...wouldnt the magnetic charge from say, turning on my monitor, cause problems with the MRAM, without some big shielding? Considering if I even think about magnets any floppy I have sitting around goes foom, whats going to happen when I'm relying on my 'instant on' MRAM to be ready?
Here's an article from Scientific American on the topic.
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You are a fucking moron.
Borrowing the concept of magentic palstic (tape) ar we. Next comes Tube Amplified processing.
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
Seriously. What makes MRAM so special that it can beat out those other concepts?
No, I would be right.
Let's go to dictionary.com for FACTOR:
"A quantity by which a stated quantity is multiplied or divided, so as to indicate an increase or decrease in a measurement"
2 * 100 = 200 ~ 256 (sorta)
2megs increasing by a FACTOR of 100, gets us to 200megs, no exponents, no scientific notation. By 2010, I don't think 20 gigs of RAM in a home machine sounds unreasonable.
Thanks for the attempted correction. Next time you might want to know what you're talking about.
-B
the article not mentioning anything on how big these modules are actually going to be? So what can we expect? A really big external 2 Gig Firewire memory block that will keep it's data even during reboots and stuff?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
It should be much easier to crash a system with powerful stray magnetic fields.
-Shieldwolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
The thought of not having to wait for my machine to boot is extremely appealing. The thought of not having to wait for some of the servers here to reboot is even more appealing.
However, I don't see how this helps much with speech recognition or easier downloading as the article suggests. Am I not seeing something?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember reading some article about the time and money put into making the space shuttle's 3 computers almost 100% failsafe. Because of the knowledge built up over time, and the importance of quality control over the newest technology, these computers have never been replaced. I think they're in the league of a 8088 in terms of memory and speed. I also remember the memory as being described as wrapped ferrite cores. Same stuff?
On a slightly more serious note, some of the early palmtops had problems when they didn't have a way to clear memory and so had no equivalent of "reboot" if the system gets hosed. I think we'll see a BIOS ability to clear the "memory" on reboot and reload everything. Or maybe OS's will improve, but when something dies really badly I find it nice (windows or linux! I find this happening under both, though more for linux) to be able to start over with a freshly cleared memory.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What kind of a con is that? It's not as if chipsets (from the same manufacturer) don't turn over every year or so, and while the Athlon is just over a year old, there are half a dozen different chipsets for it from four different manufacturers, some of which have already been rendered useless.
Besides, new technology makes the old stuff really cheap. SDRAM is *great* if you ask me, and I plan on snatching up a bunch (including half a GB for my primary system) while it is still considered "obsolete", before they raise the price because of its rarity.
(end comment) */ }
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[an error occurred while processing this directive]
- How about not waiting a minute or more for your personal computer or laptop to boot up? With MRAM, "instant-on" computing becomes possible
When using the most popular OS (ie: NT, Win 9x), I don't think this would be much of an advantage. You almost need to reboot daily/weekly to make sure your system starts from scratch. Otherwise, you'd have 2 weeks of memory leaks, and other associated garbage floating around.Not to say Linux is better. On my Dell Inspiron, coming out of suspend mode makes it do other weird things (but I tend to want to blame Dell over Linux).
Since Rambus apparently holds US Patent #87290470298514, Grand Unification Theorem as Applied to Memory Systems, expect to see this "Law office disguised as a engineering firm" (Intel quote) to haul IBM into court as soon as the technology is viable.
Lots of interesting reading
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Seems like I've read this somewhere before...
C-RAM is more likely to be the next big memory tech, as it is impervious to magnetism, radiation, and tempest-style hostile scanning. Chalcogenide memory can be programmed either electonically or optically. "Unlike FLASH and DRAM technologies, which work better when they are bigger, simulations indicate chalcogeniderequires less energy and changes phase faster as the size decreases. In addition, early attempts at fabricating simple C-RAM cells produced cycling endurance limits exceeding 10^12, or one trillion, write/erase cycles and data retention times exceeding ten years at 130C. " See This Air Force Space Vehicles Directorate Report by Mr. Ken Hunt for details. CRAM also makes a tasty treat for hobbits on the run.
With conventional memory this thing eat battery even if it's turned off and when the batteries run out - whooosh! All data stored in the RAM is gone.
Microsoft? Is that some kind of a toilet paper?
In production by 2004
There will be some test versions out in 2003, but IBM, which will make the chips at its own plants, doesn't expect volume production until sometime in 2004, Davari said.
If this is correct, you will not want any of the initial run. Who things we'll still want a 256Mb ram chip in 2004? More likely we'll be at 512 as a minimum, and as such, these will be worthless. Not to mention that they will be expensive, in all likelyhood.
I'll wait until it's less expensive, personally, and more usefull - like say a 1Gb chip. THAT would be cool. I'd think it has OTHER applications as well - imagine a storage CUBE of these, say 100Gb? I'd find that VERY useful. Since it's magnetic, it could be treated like a big drive. Imagine the access time!
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
Even though I'm well aware of the fact that MRAM is decidedly far more advanced than the magnetic RAM of old, I can't help but chuckle at the article's starry-eyed vision of tomorrow's "instant-on" computers. I can close my eyes and imagine...
$ man reality
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Well its great and all that the inital chips will be available in 256mb varities...and a smaller physical chip is great for MP3s player and such... but the article says IBM doesn't think it'll be in volume production for another 10 years. So um...what difference does it make on the products we have today? Do you seriously think that 10 years from now we are still going to have portable mp3 players?
I don't like how the article makes it seem like MRAM is the answer to today's memory design challenges, when most of the products its going to benefit probably won't be around in 10 years. Or of they are around, they'll be completely different.
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All the same, if they can integrate it, more power to them! IBM fab just continues to rock.
That I got from the IBM site here
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
What I am waiting for is a 10Gig (or more) bank of non-volitile memory.. It wouldn't even have to be fast.. Hell, if it were 100 times slower than SDRAM it would still be worth while.. The reason is that you could treat main-memory as a cache into a very very special and protected read-write region of the nvram. With this you could do away with all swapping and most of the complexities of disk-writes.
In fact, you could finally treat files as character devices instead of block devices (though you could maintain the latter for compatibility). When you do this, memory mapping of disk-space is nothing more than literally allocating a chunk of nvram into your address space.
You'd still have to perform disk-syncing, though it would be more like cache flushing than anything else. The disk sector would shrink from 512Bytes to 128Bytes (a typical cache line)
Through the use of memory mapping and independant read/write/execute permissions on memory pages, you could achieve a whole new software design structure which completely eliminates the need for OS-calls for disk access for anything other than setup and shut down. Databases could achieve phenominal performance gains.
I know that nvram disks have been around for a while, but they've been incredibly expensive, and only support very small disk sizes (couple gig max).
Assuming the power requirements on MRAM are low, and that the cell size can be comparable to that of DRAM, then we should be able to achieve 40Gig MRAM disk drives at some point, which are a good size for serious servers. So long as you can daisy-chain them as with SCSI, then you're good to go.
On 64bit machines, all you need are the appropriate drivers and you're golden.. Sadly, 32bit machines would require some sort of banked paging. Thankfully, this would enhance the general desire for 64bit machines and then things like AMDs x86-64 and Intels Italium would receive a brand new source of demand. SUN and Alpha would be the immediate benificiaries, of course.
-Michael
This is pretty funny... Does anybody remember that we used to have 'wireless video' a long time ago? It was called broadcasting, and it worked with a magical device called a TV. Man, we didn't have RAM back then, just our wireless video.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I don't wait for my laptop to boot - I suspend and resume it like most laptop users. The people who write articles for ZDnet are clearly so inexperienced with computers they've never even used a laptop (or maybe they have but they were too scared to select 'suspend' from a menu). No wonder they can't figure out what faster RAM is all about.
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-- SIGFPE
Could IBM do some magnetic CPUs? That will be cool too...
Seems to me certain operating systems will have to clean up their act to work with this stuff. If your OS and applications never get unloaded, you could easily get stuck in a useless state. I suppose they'll have to figure out a way to flush the whole thing, short of dropping a magnet into your case. Putting it in the BIOS menus would be a pain in the butt to do. Maybe another button next to reset?
And while I'm thinking, pretend this technology is scalable enough to get up in the gigabyte range. Would it be possible to replace your hard drive with MRAM and push the latency waaaay down?
It's amazing how much technology has come from IBM in the past couple of years. Just from memory: :)
:)
Now:
Copper chip technology
The Microdrive
Ultra High-res LCD screens
Many advancements in HDD tech.
Linux on a watch.
Soon:
*Usable* wearable computers
MRAM
????
It's incredible what a company can produce when they decide that research should be a priority. Either that, or an alien spacecraft crashed into an IBM campus.
Demosthenes
The way you write to your hard drive and to
this MRAM is that you expose it to a magnetic
field. However, it is NOT the overall strength
of the magnet that matters. What does matter is
the amount of magnetic flux which passes through
the medium you are writing to. You can increase
flux by either increasing the strength of the
magnet used to write, or by shrinking the gap
between the two poles.
Your hard drive uses a write head with an
extremely small gap, and when put close to the
magnetic medium produces alot of flux. But
because the overall magnetic field strength is
small and the force falls off(I want to say as the
square of the distance but I am not sure because
I don't want to treat it as a point source) very
quickly as you move away. That is why you don't
have to shield platters from each other in your
hard drive.
Back to MRAM. This is why you don't need to
shield the MRAM either, because even if you go
at it with a pretty good magnet you will not get
enough flux through the magnetic film to change
the direction of the field stored.
Yes, there would probably be enough energy in
an EMP pulse to take this out. But it would have
already fried all the semi-conductors on the
motherboard. So either way your just sitting in
the dark.
Maybe when this comes out I can cool the RAM to superconducting temperatures and use the judder effect to launch my computer into space.
I've always wanted to be able to stick computer memory to my fridge door!
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The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.
/me walks down the sidewalk with an electromagnet, destroying everyone's MRAM based computers on the block
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Could we see a linux util that will check the intergrity of a your memory as part of the boot process...if it is corrupt, then you have to re-load memory.
I don't know why it would give you better speech recog, or easier download...but I am guessing it will be fast! No longer will you need to refresh memory all the time, that saves mucho time! It also means that these things will be able to lower the power cosumption...combine these with transmeta chips...and you might see 10+ hour laptop battery lives!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
I'm truly impressed, though, since I saw that tiny little 340Meg hard drive that could hide behind a Kennedy half-dollar. They've figured out how to make all those tiny little wires and ferrite beads on a micron scale, eh? At last we can upgrade the 360/40! Kewl! ;-)
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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Trolling using another account since 2005.