Slashdot Mirror
No More Rebooting?
blankmange writes: "This headline caught my eye: 'The End of Computer Rebooting.' Seems that there has been some new developments in memory technology: The new thin-film technology that could give rebooting the boot is based on resistor logic rather than the traditional transistor logic used in most PCs and other memory-enabled devices. It also is considerably faster than current memory systems and holds the promise of reducing the time required to transfer and download multimedia content and other massive files. This is great news, but what am I going to do with the extra hour or so a day?"
People: Read the frelling article. This isn't 'an end to rebooting', it's highspeed nonvolatile memory that could theoretically be used to replace mass storage and RAM simultaneously. Although this would speed up booting a bit, it would not obviate rebooting entirely.
In fact, on some OSen (cough, Windows, cough) it could be very dangerous - if there's only one copy of the OS code in this combination memory, you can't reboot and reload a fresh copy from disk - meaning bugs have a significantly greater probability of rendering your system unusable.
Sounds like fun, right?
--
Damn the Emperor!
I found that Watt numbers on the power supply are quite a bit more than the real consumption. The number is the maximum allowed, and is reached only during start-up, if ever.
To make an example, I admin a small Linux cluster with 6 PCs. Each of them is a 1.3 Ghz Thunderbird, with 1.5 gigs of PC133 RAM, an average HD, and a 300W power supply. Most of the time the processors are at 100% load.
All 6 machines are powered with a 2000 VA UPS. An UPS like that is capable of delivering around 1600 Watts, but the load indicator never surpassed the mid level. So I would say that 150 Watts are more than enough for an average PC to operate. The 300-400 watts are for booting the things and spinning the drives up.
This is an appalling summary - and the article is no better.
"The technology is highly suitable for broadband Internet connections, Hsu said, noting that it combines the features of low voltage, high speed and low power consumption."
Yes, fantastic. That's great for those broadband internet connections. Faster memory is always good, but choosing this as an application is just a moronic use of buzz words.
"Ignatiev said the new technology is about 1,000 times faster than flash, which is nonmechanical and currently the speediest memory on the market. "
Flash memory is the fastest type of memory on the market? No, it is a form of non-volatile memory, which is very slow by RAM standards.
"is based on resistor logic rather than the traditional transistor logic"
Actually, you'll find that DRAM in most modern computers are capacitative devices - the techniques to make them are the same as MOS transistors, but they do not use switching to store values, IIRC.
I wish people would not spout such rubbish.