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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."
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?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I'm glad to see that the hardware industry is producing vaporware now and that vaporware is not exclusive to the software industry.
BTW didn't Bill Gates promise instant booting PCs five or so years ago? My new machine takes a full two minutes to boot.
"...simply reach out and touch an on/off button to turn off Windows in lieu of going through a ritualized shut-down procedure."
who says we will be running windows by then?
I hope not....
I can't wait to be called out to degaus someone's ram after their system crashes.
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.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
MRAM @ whatis.techtarget.com
MRAM @ Webopedia
MRAM @ German Wikipedia
This is damn sexy technology. Almost makes up for the vaporware that was Keele Memory systems. And if I hear one more whiny person say, "no, quantum computers are coming in two years! Have patience!" I think I'll go destroy something expensive...
A little more indepth view of MRAM can be read here.
Does anyone know if MRAM will be sensative to external magnets? Aka if I bump my portable mp3/ogg player into a giant fridge mag will I lost my data?
Apple free since 1990!
I timed BeOS on my new machine. It gets from power on to fully usable desktop in just under 16 seconds. Too bad the only thing it's good for anymore is booting fast :-(
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).
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
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.
Does this mean that when my cell phone rings, my speakers AND my RAM are going to go nuts?
Will my pc run faster if it is facing polar north?
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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.
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).
Here's a better link for more info on MRAM. Pretty graphic of an MRAM cell.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
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.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
I just can't for that new memory does ... does, er.. hmm, what does it do again?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
is now 60 seconds of pr0n viewing. Viewing time that would have been lost to oblivion. Thank The Maker.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
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.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Strange, my computer crashes each time I hit the "degauss" button on my monitor ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
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And why cant this be done with flashram?
Well, it can. You can have a CompactFlash IDE drive as your boot device.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
'Unlike conventional high-speed memory devices, MRAM uses magnetism instead of electrical charges to store data -- making it, in a sense, a back-to-the-future technology based on the same laws of physics that enabled the creation of audio and videotape recorders as well as hard drives.''
To say nothing of drums and original core memory!
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
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).
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....
-- Ancient (IBM 1620 and Atari 400) Programmer
Well, why do people always log in as AC if they want to post shit?
1) They will create MUCH less heat than common RAM. They dont need capacitors (which discharge creating head and have to be refreshed, costing power).
2) (smoking crack?) I dont even have the slightest idea why they should emit beta radiation, but even if they did, beta radiation isnt very good at penetrating anything. even if some electron could escape the plastic casing of the Ram package, is would surely stopped by your case.
3) Comparisons with flash memory are far more useful considering the proposed usage of MRAM. Also stacking would be potential way to increase packing density, because there is no need for capacitor trenches.
4) What part of "first generation" did you not understand?
I try to imagine how humanity would progress with your attitude:
Eddison: Why bother creating a lightbulb, it will only break after a short time nobody will need it.
von Braun: The thing could explode and even if it works, it just falls down again. Why should i create a rocket?
Einstein: Everthing seems relative... But i guess that we can never make use of it because we would need complicated machinery and mathematics. Lets paint some pictures instead...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
SDRAM is power hungry during sleep mode ( a few mA) and has a slow sleep/wake-up sequence. This is not very nice for some devices like cellphones.
I think the most likely use we'll see for MRAM in the short term is having, say, 256kB of MRAM in a cellphone for running the cellphone engine and using SDRAM etc for the extended features.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
When you burn a cd does ambient light destroy the medium? No. Just like a strong enough light source (for example, the burning laser in your xDRW drive) could destroy or alter the data on it. There is not going to be a strong enough field to do this accidentally, the fields put off by electronics are too small to be of much concern. If there even was a problem, parity algorythms could be used the same way they are in larger magnetic media (RAID). It is certain that a stong enough magnetic field could depolarize the data but I doubt the field is that "loose". Furthermore a magnetic field is inversly proportional to the square of the distance to the source ( E~1/[R^2] ) which decays rather rapidly as the distance increases. Electronic devices may operate at a high frequency but the power (amplitude)is too low to low to generate the field that would be required. Electic/Magnetic Field Equations
I used to keep my computer on 24/7. Then I put it in my bedroom. Did I mention I have a big-ass server case with six fans? Nowadays, I'd rather wait the three minutes for boot-up and get a decent night's sleep; I'm funny like that.
--All your stolen base are belong to Rickey Henderson