Spintronics in your Future?

slugfro writes: "Do faster boot times and RAM that maintains memory after shutdown sound interesting? This article by a Science Magazine author details the study of utilizing the spin of electrons rather than just the charge in electronic devices (hence the name 'Spintronics'). Anyone out there researching this or have more info?" We do a story about MRAM every four months or so, and each time commercial development is a few years in the future. :)

Comments

Reboot...

[TheShadow]

A lot of people are complaining that they only reboot their machines to "clear" the RAM. And they seem to think that if Windows crashed, this new MRAM stuff will cause their computer to be in a permanent crashed state.

Well, obviously, computers making use of MRAM will have some way to purge the memory. And maybe the OS would set a flag on a normal shutdown that would tell the BIOS (or whatever it would be when this stuff comes out) that it can go ahead and just jump right to the OS (and the OS would clear that flag as it's first order of business). If the flag didn't exist, it would go through a boot sequence which involved loading the OS off a hard drive or whatever.

But let's look at the advantages of having persistent RAM. If you have a journaling file system, the journal could be kept in memory without fear that it would be lost on a crash. When the system comes back up that data would be in memory and could then be used to repair the file system. Also, disk writes would be extremely fast because they could be cached and when the system is idle or when the disk is not busy, they could be written at that time instead of having to be written to a log that is physically on disk.

Maybe, programs that are running could survive an OS crash because their state would be perfectly perserved in persistent memory.

And if CPUs had persistent registers... recovering from a power failure would be seamless.

Just some thoughts.