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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."
This memory get's rid of the need to save your settings to the hard disk as you power down. But when your computer dies, you don't want the "bad" settings saved to the hard disk.
It will be interesting to see the new breeds of virus that this brings out.
See what I don't get is why can they flash the memory after a successfull boot to disk. Then the next time you boot you read the 50 or so MB off disk [which would take all of 10 seconds max] and boom start executing [like a resume-from-ram thingy]
Why the need to load/parse all the startup scripts over and over for each boot when they should all be the same....
and yes, I'm filing for a patent on this idea. [NOT!]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
This would be a great thing for power bills as well.
Lots of times you want to keep a machine up all the time, like in my case when it's serving up a webpage or two and acting as a print server. But I'm sure there are also plenty of people who leave their machines on all the time just to avoid the startup/shutdown time. I know I do it with my laptop just to avoid the un-hibernation.
With power supplies averaging, oh, 300 or so watts, that can mean decent savings when you figure it running 24x7.
[..] but isn't there a chance of problems if you put magnetic things near storage media?
Of course, but these units generate a pretty wee field I'd imagine.
As it stands now we have to keep the magnet controllers (SGI O2s and Octanes mainly) well away from the magnets because of the hard drives and monitors.
The interesting Windows comment to me was 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 Windows makes a bunch of registry writes upon shutdown, and writes to the logs, and formally terminates background process allowing them to make any log entries they choose to, and......
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
For embedded devices it offers more than just boot time improvements. MRAM promises to replace battery backed SRAM which improves reliability (no battery). MRAM can also render obsolete the complex issue of copying DRAM data to a flash file system - here, the advantage is more a case of creating a simple design ... simple = more reliable.
Is Rambus involved? I didn't see any mention of Rambus, but someone might want to check... your backside for a knife... er... I mean check the US Patent Office to see if they've patented the IP.
-- No sig for you!
Well, when a PC boots up you also lose all the applications you had running, and that's more than a few minutes' loss of work. Even if you save everything before shutting down you still won't have all the right windows / Emacs buffers / web pages open. Suspend to hard disk can alleviate this, but even there you worry about network connections and strange things that can go wrong on restore.
Hmm, what's my argument here? MRAM would be just as bad as suspending to disk, only a bit faster. And if suspending to disk is not popular now (I don't know anyone who does it for desktop systems - and by popularity I include 'the OS and vendor support it') then why should it be any better with MRAM?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The story is almost worthless marketing drivel. How about answers to some very basic questions like:
What is the capacity?
What is "extremely dense" in quantitative terms, and how do they achieve it?
If it's really going to be a "universal RAM replacement", how does it compare with the 512 Mb DRAMs recently announced?
There are many more similar questions, but answers to these three would be a start.
"Technically, it sounds like a miniature magnetic drum."
This is more like core memory. Plus this is faster than static RAM. Which itself is faster than DRAM.
BTW I wonder what this means for OS design? No more caching, and other techniques for dealing with a slow device.
well, he didnt make instant booting, but Be almost did. ~20 seconds max to boot beos is close enough to instant for me.
> "I allege that SCO is full of it" -Linus
The system would have to assume that quite a lot of things are unchanged from boot to boot. Have you ever suspended a modern operating system (with a disk cache) and dualbooted to another OS before loading up the first OS again? Data-loss big time.
I'm struck by how much the HowStuffWorks picture of MRAM memory (*) looks like the donut-on-a-wire ferrite core memory. All that's missing are the 150-ohm terminating resistors.
I like the idea of a HD-less instant-on PC. One of the great things about my Palm Pilot is that the kids can turn it on and off without any "shutdown" process... although all my kids have known how to shut down Windows properly since they could understand the "To turn off press Start" concept.
On the other hand, it's already hard enough to restart a locked-up PC when the so-called power switch doesn't have anything to do with the power. How will I fix a PC when pulling the plug doesn't even reboot the OS?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
True. However, you still have to wait for XP to finish contemplating it's navel before you get actual work done. Microsoft's own applications aren't even immune from this.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Ok, MagRAM sounds all nice and stuff, but are we going to get scalped on the price like we did on SDRAM and earlier DDR modules?