MRAM in 2004?

amberspry writes "As previously reported here and here. Wired has yet another update on MRAM here. They give hope by mid-2004 we will see devices with faster boot up times and using less power as a 'vastly accelerated timetable is being implemented.' Gotta love joint ventures."

Comments

Magnetic memory?

[Sheetrock]

I'm sure there probably isn't anything to worry about, but isn't there a chance of problems if you put magnetic things near storage media?

Re:Magnetic memory?

[tomstdenis]

I don't think the field is that big.

Besides any conductor with a current generates a magnetic field.... [well there are probably exceptions... I'm not an EE or PHYS dude].

I think the MRAM guys are talking way small scale here :-)

tom

Re:Magnetic memory?

[connsmythe96]

I think the problem is that bringing an outside magnet near the MRAM will corrupt data, not that the MRAM will be corrupting other things.

can't wait

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

I can't wait till this technology can permanantly remember data. AND it gets cheap enough to replace the spinning hard drive. Speeding up the memory read/write times and reducing the memory bottleneck could effect your pc much more than upgrading from a 1.8 ghz to a 2.0 ghz processor.

I'm not sure how accurate this statement is.

[Prince_Ali]

"How many people keep their computer on 24 hours a day simply because they can't stand to sit around for four or five minutes waiting for it to boot up?" he asked. "I don't think anyone has researched that particular issue, but I'll bet there are a lot of them.

Most people will just grab a beverage or something during the minute (or less) it takes most PCs to startup. I would think most of the people who keep their PCs on 24/7 do it for P2P or [Seti|Folding]@home or possibly to prevent wear and tear on the hard drive (spinning up the hard drive wears it down faster than anything).

Re:I'm not sure how accurate this statement is.

[nosilA]

It's not the short amount of time it takes to boot up, but the amount of time it takes to log in, start various applications, connect to various computers, etc. That's all interactive and a big pain. Unfortunately, this wouldn't keep me from having to log back into all of the various ssh sessions I have open, but it would help somewhat.

Re:I'm not sure how accurate this statement is.

[Kaa]

I would think most of the people who keep their PCs on 24/7 do it for P2P or [Seti|Folding]@home or possibly to prevent wear and tear on the hard drive (spinning up the hard drive wears it down faster than anything).

All of my many boxes (with the exception of laptops) are on 24/7. The main reason is to save wear and tear on components. For solid-state devices the main killer is thermal stress. Thermal stress occurs when the device either warms up or cools down and not shutting the machine down avoids it. Not completely -- an idle chip generates significantly less heat than a busy one -- but it helps a great deal. Not having to spin up and down the hard drive is also in the same category.

Besides a lot of my boxes are micro-servers: a shared directory here, a shared printer there...

Not having to wait for the machines to boot is just a free bonus.

Faster startup times? Whatever...

[Plasmic]

From the article:

faster startup times for computers, PDAs and cell phones

Clearly, my computer will startup no faster than it does when coming out of Standby mode (which stores the state of my computer in RAM, but requires that the PC remain plugged in). So, what do I gain? Basically, we get Standby mode that works even when you unplug the computer. And, that's still no improvement to the "startup time".

So, who needs their cell phone or PDA to startup faster? Most of these devices are pulling straight from some flavor of RAM during startup, already.

How often do you reset your iPaq? Just when it crashes, and it only takes 5 seconds, anyhow.

What about that annoying startup time on your cell phone? Let's see, only when the battery falls out do I ever exercise that feature.

If MRAM is really 6 times faster than today's static RAM, that's wonderful, but it will have little impact on startup times (see Hard Drive I/O-blocking).

Re:Faster startup times? Whatever...

[Ed Avis]

I don't think you're seeing the big picture. If MRAM can store data persistently, that means no more need for a hard disk (backups happen over the network). A big cause of failure, noise and expense is cut out immediately, at least for systems that don't need to store large amounts of data locally.

You could just boot the machine from a Knoppix CD - or the equivalent for Windows - and save your files into MRAM. This assumes MRAM can mature to the point where it is no more unreliable than a hard disk, which shouldn't be too difficult.

Still won't help Windows

[thepacketmaster]

MRAM is designed to allow programs and data to remain in the local memory and may even, someday, allow us to simply reach out and touch an on/off button to turn off Windows in lieu of going through a ritualized shut-down procedure.

Except for the fact that due to all the memory leaks and other programming issues in Windows, you'll still need to do your daily hard reboot. This will just make it slightly faster.

Motorola

[chia_monkey]

I don't want to sound too cynical here, but I just can't seem to get so excited about Motorola working on new innovative technology and continuing on with it. I remember when Motorola phones were the way to go. Even more dramatic an example though is the whole PPC chip. There was once a time the chips they produced for the Macs were just slightly slower than Intel's chips (in terms of MHz...but we all know that doesn't really matter for true performance). But then they seemed to take naps that lasted for years while AMD and Intel kept improving chip speed and performance. Sure...Motorola may be working on this now, but from what we've seen in the past, I wouldn't be surprised to see them resting on their laurels and letting the world pass them by yet again.

Re:"Keeping the computer on"

[afidel]

I would advise against this. As many sysadmins know if your HDD's are used to being at a raised temperature they bearing will expand and create a groove in their track. Once you power them down a HDD that has been running flawlessly for years will often fail to spin up again after only a few minutes downtime. This is probably not a problem for more modern liquid bearing drives.

The computer you want always cost $1500

[tjamme]

For those wondering what the use would be of an instantly rebootable computer, they obvously haven't been on the phone with NTL support asking you to reboot your machine after every change.
Or they're not running mission critical servers were every minute of downtime costs thousands of units of whatever strong currency you're using.

But fast or not, it will not last. I mean, sure I can (could: I haven't tried) boot Windows 3.1 on my 1.4 GHz P4 in 3 seconds flat, but so what? Microsoft is going to always use 150% of your resources just to make sure they're never beaten on the feature list (otherwise known as peeing contest) and the insecure open source community is never far behind (but always so) with ever growing feature lists too as they want to catch up. (I DO love Linux, OK?)

So MRAM technolgy may be all that good, but it will be abused without a doubt as soon as MS get their greasy hands on it and fit all their development machines with it.

To be fair NTL tech support is OK, once you get to them (after about 2 hours) and once they start listening to you (about 30 to 45 minutes).

Remember Ferroelectric memory?

[chasm!killer]

Does this remind anyone but me of the ferroelectric memory cells of about a decade ago?

Smaller than DRAM cells, faster than SRAM and nonvolatile as well. They did actually make it out into the real world, several devices made today include a dozen or so F-RAM cells, but they certainly did not take over the world.

One thing that does shout "vaporware" to me is that the articles I can find are all really sparse on details.

Also, how compatible is this technology with common (or esoteric, for that matter) silicon technology? If it's not, can we use the same technology to build processors, etc.?

How soon do we actually get to see a 256 MBit MRAM device? How much will it cost in 2005? The answer to those questions will tell me a lot about whether this is enough to make people show interest in Motorola's stock again....