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MRAM Inches Towards Prime Time
levin writes "According to an article over at EETimes, magnetoresistive RAM chips are getting a little more practical. Infineon Technologies released info on a new 16M MRAM component on Tuesday and the read and write cycle times of this chip make it 'competitive with established DRAM.' How long before nonvolatile memory becomes the solution to crash-prone software rather than better programming?"
Last time I checked, most of the software crashes aren't caused by memory randomly disappearing.
How long before nonvolatile memory becomes the solution to crash-prone software rather than better programming?
Probably very long......
There are very little volatile-memory related software bugs.....
HINT: You don't want your ram back in the same corrupt state it was in before the reboot.
Jeroen
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Looks cool for applications such as hibernate.
How is nonvolatile RAM supposed to prevent crashes? Crashes are the result of unexpected program interaction, hardware incompatibilty, or poorly-anticipated user input.
"How long before nonvolatile memory becomes the solution to crash-prone software rather than better programming?"
Never. Having the same bits in memory after a reboot doesn't help if you wrote the wrong bits in the first place.
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
~Lake
Non-volatile main memory is unlikely to be a solution against crash-prone software. If the software crashed because there was a bug in how it handled the data in memory, if the data is still there and the application reads it again, it'll just crash in exactly the same place.
In any case, an application crashing very seldom causes the machine to actually power down, and an application crashing and being restarted never gets to use the same memory the same way anyway, so the point is entirely moot. If your main memory is nonvolatile RAM, the advantage is you can design a system that can be powered down and suspended without having all that lengthy write of the entire machine's state to disk (and read when it comes back up again), which would be extremely useful on a laptop. If you can do this, you can have essentially uptime of years, so the incentive would be to write MORE stable operating systems and applications if the expectation is that even a laptop may go years between reboots.
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There are very little volatile-memory related software bugs.....
Oh, are you SURE about that? You should research such statements first, my friend, rather than assuming.
Take a look at this review from last year of power supplies by Anandtech.
They ran a six-hour memory test 54 times--and found that with 512MB of RAM, after each six hour test there were an average of four bits that had flipped! That means there is a memory error on a 512MB PC--on average--every 90 minutes!
If that error occurs in a code segment in a driver, you may get a system crash. In a Windows DLL, perhaps some system instability. In an application, perhaps an application crash. If it's in a data segment, your important manuscript may suddenly lose a paragraph or skip a couple pages as a linked list pointer jumps to the wrong spot, or you may find a bunch of junk replacing normal text.
Memory errors are a serious problem that very few people acknowledge. Why people still buy non-ECC RAM is beyond me. (Of course, even with ECC RAM, there are still various places inside the PC where failure can occur--along the various buses for exmaple, which don't all have ECC. So this is only part of the solution.)
More reliable RAM would definitely be a step in the right direction.