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A Magnetic Memory Alternative to Hard Disk
Dr Occult writes "Finally, a magnetic memory chip has been manufactured in volume and released by the U.S. company Freescale. Christened MRAM (magnetoresistive random-access memory),this chip will hold information even after power has been switched off. From the BBC news article: 'Unlike flash memory, which also can keep data without power, Mram has faster read and write speeds and does not degrade over time,' and 'MRAM chips could one day be used in PCs to store an operating system, allowing computers to start up faster when switched on.'"
Information about the product from the Freescale Press Release
MRAM is *not* a hard drive alternative because it needs to be fabricated with traditional chip lithography. Also, MRAM cells are very large, even compared with flash memory.
It would be extremely expensive to create an "MRAM hard drive". This is just more pump and dump for Freescale daytraders.
More
It will be a while before they get their $25 / 4 megabit wholesale price to anywhere close to reasonable.0 4801944-v71_ITCad7JIwzqJZ_nfN_pacDg_20060809.html? mod=tff_main_tff_top
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB1152491713
When will this be available?
I predict the Commodore 64 will rise again, although this time, it will be 64 Gig!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Sounds a lot like the old core memory that used to be used in big iron...
Okay, so next time I'm down at the computer store, I need to buy a better machine.
[
This held its data for years after it was powered off.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
XP boots in about a minute, and Linux never needs to be rebooted. :)
What other applications could this have besides boot time?
Execute? [Y/N] _
This won't be replacing harddrives in personal computers for years to come. However, if they can get these things ~6gigs with a far higher reliability rating than harddrives, these would be ideal for corporate use.
I would kill for these where I work.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
First: freescale aims on the usage of MRAM in embeddet devices and microcontrollers. There will be no MRAM-Harddisk next month in the shops. 2nd: There is not only Freescale. Micromem will produce MRAM-Chips for the Aerospace industry. And IBM/Infineon already have an 16-MBit-MRAM-Chip since last year. There are also Renesas/Toshiba in the race. It's a completely new tech, you heard about years ago, when the first theories about mram came from the labs. But such a thing needs everytime many years to go to the serial production lines.
Aren't editors supposed to edit for things like grammar?
/. editors do? Stick a pin in an article and throw it on the front page without even reading it?
What do
Freescale's MRAM technology isn't all that new...it's an old Motorola technology that they kept running with when they were spun off. It's taken them a few years to get going again, but it's already been done for a while.
That said, MRAM ain't a HD replacement yet. No one outside the aerospace industry is using it for storage right now that I'm aware of, and even if someone was, making a large enough FRAM based drive with 4Mb chips is HARD. 2 chips for every MB. 2048 chips for every GB. a 500GB FRAM disk would require 1,024,000 of these chips, requiring nearly 2,500 sqft of PCB space, and more power than a pile of overclocked P4s (~9mA * 3.3V * 1,024,000 chips = 30.4128kW at IDLE). Even if someone could build that, it'd be farking huge, run inconcievably hot, be incredibly power hungry, and sell for an obscenely expensive price, even for the most extr33m gadget hunters.
Wait for 32 and 64Mb chips. Then we'll talk.
Right now I'm too busy working with a serial FRAM from Ramtron to write more.
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
I don't want this in my PC to boot my O/S quicker. I want this in my TV / Video / STB / whatever so that I can turn them off at night and not have to wait for ages for them to be reinitialised / scan for frequencies / whatever they actually do when they are turned on. It would also make me not have to reprogram my favourites and display settings, which currently do not survive a power cycle. Get these into modern A/V technology and we can finally do away with the necessity of standby just to speed up watching the TV in the morning.
Did you RTFA? This is the first commercial MRAM product which is being produced in volume. They have customers for it, and they've already built up a stock of the stuff. Can't call it vaporware if it supposedly actually exists somewhere and is ready to be shipped.
We've been hearing vaporware mram chip stories for almost a decade now... When is it going to be on the market for people to purchase and use?
Now, apparently. That's what this story is about. Here's a link to the actual chip's spec sheet. Here's a link to the chip's page on Freescale, where you can order it for $25/chip in 1000 unit quantities.
It's not in any consumer products yet, no, but it is available to purchase, which means it isn't vaporware.
Note also that Freescale has close ties to Motorola. I would not be surprised if this starts showing up in consumer electronics before long now.
It's not like they're saying "we WILL have something tangible", but rather "we HAVE something tangible".
On the other hand - sorry, I don't quite see how these will be in competition with hard-drives, if you see that they are working on 4(!) MEGAbit chips... To Freescale: Call me again when it's 4 GIGAbit chips...
I see those as small stepping stones, but not more, right now.
Don't you mean Hard Disk Killer?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summ ary.jsp?code=MR2A16A&srch=1
"The MR2A16A is a 4,194,304-bit magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) device organized as 262,144 words of 16 bits"
Not ready for PC time yet.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
- as fast as SRAM (i.e. cache in your processor)
- as small (i.e. as hight density) as DRAM; single MRAM memory cell is two magnets instead of two conductors of capacitor in DRAM, but the (theoretical) size is of the same order of magnitude
- non-volatile like Flash, but with random access and orders of magnitude faster, w/o "write penalty" and w/o erase/write cycles limit
- much less energy-hungry than SRAM, DRAM and Flash while working; when not working it can keep information at least as well as Flash
It's in development since the eighties and it will take time before we "get there" but it is possible, that one day MRAM could replace cache, main memory and memory cards in our computers.When? I have no idea, but AFAIR transistors didn't get from prototype to 65nm in a decade. Hopefully engineergs and managers in some semiconductor companies have longer attention span than an avarage slashdot reader.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
Here's the datasheet link: http://www.freescale.com/files/microcontrollers/do c/data_sheet/MR2A16A.pdf
As was noted above, this is actually being produced, so by definition it isn't vaporware.
The problems MRAM could address are very real, and people have been working on using MRAM/GMR-based memory for a long time for that very reason.
Kythe
This would be wonderful as a RAM replacement IF it scaled up enough. Trouble is, RAM has been a necessary computer component for years, so it was inevitable that it would get cheaper & smaller as the necessary manufacturing processes were refined.
This has an awfully long way to come, so it's not going to be adopted wide-scale as a RAM replacement in PCs - at least not straight away. How long would it take the production of this stuff to get up to a competitive scale?
It might work its way in eventually:
1. Small MRAM chips used in phones, PDAs, A/V devices to store state, speeding up boot-time.
2. Pervades handheld-electronics market - becomes ubiquitous enough to scale up and improve manufacturing processes
3. Eventually finds some server-use to improve operation (maybe mirroring RAM periodically to recover quickly from crash, whatever)
4. Finally works its way onto desktop motherboards
(5. Profit?)
Seriously though, this is hardly going to make waves for some time.
Meta will eat itself
so we're looking at 'about' 3 inches for 16meg (in this case)
It's core memory all over again! But in a smaller package.
Did you know core memory was hand-made?
Seriously, I can see some application for this between flash memory and hard drives, but it will take some time to get the costs down.
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
On the other hand - sorry, I don't quite see how these will be in competition with hard-drives
Right now, they aren't. At that price point, they're competing with battery-backed SRAM (very nicely for the integrated stuff, and it depends on the product for the battery + battery monitor chip + SRAM solution).
Short primer on different memory technologies: SRAM is very fast, very low power, easy to interface, but it needs a battery for data integrity. DRAM is very cheap, but higher power, much harder to interface, and needs not only a battery but a controller for data integrity. EEPROM is everything SRAM is, but nonvolatile but is expensive, and writing requires awkward voltages, can't be done bytewise, and is slow anyway. Flash is similar to EEPROM, but beats it because it's cheaper, doesn't require weird voltages, but writing is still awkward.
The only downside to MRAM currently is its cost - fast and easy reads, fast and easy writes, nothing required to maintain it, and low power to boot. If this becomes available at distributors within a factor of 2 of that $25 price point, there's literally no point to integrated battery-backed SRAM chips anymore. If the price drops by a factor of 2 or so, there's no point to battery-backed SRAM at all.
As the price drops, though, MRAM has the potention to challenge all of those technologies above, as well as hard drives, much like flash is starting to do now.
Actually, that's not true, or rather, it depends upon the technology. GMR-based systems can be made quite dense, since it actually takes quite a strong magnetic field to flip them from one state to another. If I recall correctly (I'd need to review), ironically, the smaller the dimensions, the stronger the field required. Since magnetic fields from the electric current in write lines decrease as the square of the distance from the lines, you don't have to worry all that much about crosstalk at write time, either. And they're read directly by current passing through the devices.
The biggest problem with density is fabrication issues and design of the cells.
Kythe
I was alive and mucking about with computers in the 1980s and the "next big thing" was always going to be magnetic bubble memory. That never materialised. The closest thing I remember, apart from endless articles oversimplifying how the "bubbles" "moved along" like an old-fashioned drum memory, was a preview of a portable computer which was going to be built using bubble memory.
What I'd really like to see is a magnetic memory device using the same remanence phenomena of which Gutmann spoke in his paper on secure deletion. It ought to be possible to store several bits {possibly an infinite number?} in each location, on the basis that storing new data does not completely obliterate the old data. I have never seen anything like that in practice, except an old open-reel tape recorder with a "trick recording" button which disconnected the erase head, allowing you to e.g. play an instrument and then record your voice over the top.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
In fact, they are the former semiconductor division of Motorola. They were spun off a few years ago.
I've been hearing about these kinds of devices since "bubble memory.
Why can't I get a motherboard with 500MB Flash for storing an image of system memory exactly after the OS is loaded and initialized, that is blitted over to RAM and then tweaked (system clock, network counters, etc) in a few milliseconds? All the "loading" from storage to RAM includes minutes of computation like a second "compilation" that's practically identical every time I start the machine. How much computing power is wasted on that redundant exercise every day, around the world? I'd like to reinit only when the startup becomes corrupt, which a "known good" ROM instance could avoid better than the current chaotic process.
--
make install -not war
If data is stored as magnetic bits, wouldn't a very small magnet corrupt all this data? Computer users are warned to keep magnets away from your hard drive due to data loss, but it seems this would magnify (get it?) that problem tenfold.
Since magnetic fields from the electric current in write lines decrease as the square of the distance from the lines, you don't have to worry all that much about crosstalk at write time, either.
Oops -- slaughtered that one, didn't I? It's been too long since I looked at the equations. Straightfoward Ampere's Law: the decrease is linear, not with the square of the distance.
Still, the decrease is significant enough, and the resistance to switching state high enough, that you don't generally have to worry about write lines inadvertently flipping more than one bit.
Kythe
I wonder if it will run vista?
640k is enough for anyone
"The first markets for MRAM chips are likely to be in automotive and industrial settings, where durability is critical. Tehrani said they would also be suited for data-logging devices, such as airline black boxes that store data on aircraft performance and must be recoverable after a crash."
CNN.com article
Because we all know that the best way to test out new and unproven technologies is in critical applications where lives are on the line.
Why all of the sudden did everyone start talking in Mbits for size of memory? It just forces one to convert it to a known quantity...please, for grandma, its a 500 meg chip.
Hard drive controlers could use this type of memory for write caching without risking losing data. This is huge for RAID controlers since they could now lose their bulky batery packs and time limits on cached data integrity. This also has nice implications for write buffering in hard drive controlers since it could be done without the OS even knowing or caring. It would allow for out-of-order writes on drives where the controler decides what gets written first and even if it gets written at all without risking data integrity.
This is also huge for tiny devices that need very little local storage but do need it. Tiny linux boxes with 64MB MRam hard drives could be quite useful.
If we make mram visible to filesystems, they could decide to store their core data structures, directories, and inodes in mram space so that access to the start of each file could require only 1 drive seek.
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab nocp worlddomination
Everything old is new again. Thanks to suspend-to-ram/disk [Hibernate for you Windows users] the problem of "corrupted core" is more real than in the days of daily shutdowns. This will only make it worse.
Without volitile RAM, rebooting a computer will become rare [good] but perceived as a pain in the ass [bad]. Not as bad as reinstalling your OS [very bad] but bad nonetheless.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I just don't think they will ever be able to make the capacity big enough to hold an install of Vista and all of the security updates associated with it, and that is just the OS, no programs, those would be on a separate solid-state platter... :P
--Valthan
Cores were quite far apart compared with the size of the core. Making the domains hard to switch protects you from external fields. That's desirable for keeping your credit card from being erased by random magnets. It doesn't provide much benefit for making cores dense. (It does provide a stronger pulse on the read line though.) Hard to switch domains mean that you need a bigger field to switch them. Thus, it doesn't mean that you can place the cores closer together.
The magnetic domains on a hard disk platter are quite close together but the disk doesn't have to contain circuitry with its resultant currents and fields. The hard disk successfully keeps all fields adjacent to the gap in the head.
The other limitation is actually thermal. The heat generated by the current necessary to switch domains causes thermal vibration that can cause the domains to switch. If the domains are harder to switch, the current goes up and so does the heat.
... in place of flash memory to provide that speedy boot-up. At least MRAM would not have an upper limit on cycles of use as flash memory does. There's also the possibility that MRAMs could be used in a memory hierarchy in place of power-hungry SRAMs, providing a faster layer of memory than DRAMs for a lot less power consumption. And finally, there is the possibility of re-designing an OS to take advantage of this new form of non-volatile memory, putting most-frequently referenced objects or objects that are essential to running the system in MRAM to take advantage of either the speed or non-volatile aspects of it.
I think Freescale has produced this because they don't know how to market it, and are willing to listen and see how what marketplace does with a device having these unique characteristics.
It will, of course, get smaller, cheaper, faster over time. Whether it gets cheaper fast enough to open new markets remains an open question.
Here it is.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It lost its data the moment you read it if the read/modify/write circuitry failed. Anyone remember the PDP-8, whose accumulator cleared when you read it, presumably so if it was implemented in core, there would not be a wasted rewrite cycle if you didn't need the accumulator data again? Ah, the fun of early machines...and you could even use them in IBMs, which is more than you can do with a P4.
Pining for the fjords
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
to my good ol' vaccum tubes!
IIRC there's a certain minimum size for magnetic domains, a whole lot larger than a typical DRAM well. Seeing as the current magnetic memories are *much* larger than dram cells, and have been under development since way back in the middle of the last century, , one might hazard a guess they're not going to get a lot smaller anytime soon, if ever.
I'll bite, if only to inform you that the first 3 links out of 4 of your 'proof' were not vaporware at all, not even at the time.
Nice try.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Why all of the sudden did everyone start talking in Mbits for size of memory?
Everyone always has. Go look at chip descriptions in Digikey, or anywhere else for that matter. They only get converted to megabyte, etc. at the end-user level. Mbits are useful if you don't care about the arrangement of the memory, because usually they specify 256Kx16, for instance, which is what this is.
please, for grandma, its a 500 meg chip.
It's a 512K chip. Half a meg.
Why allways the nonsense applications?
"Alternative to harddisks"
"Make the OS load faster"
This is complete and utter nonsense. It is not a HDD alternative, because it if ar too small. OS loading is dominated by hardware detection and initialisation. A Linux-Kernel, e.g., is less than 2MB in size and is typically loaded in less than a second. This could be brought down further by the BIOS setting UDMA mode.
I guess this product does not have any real application.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hard disk write cache.
How would you like to have a write-behind cache that's safe when the power goes out?
It was going to replace hard drives too. http://www.decodesystems.com/tib0203.html
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don't know." Mark Twain
Yeah, but does it run Linux?
Wearout is a myth with modern flash filesystem software.
How much of a myth is it when you use least common denominator, portable file systems like FAT?
Until proper flash file systems go cross-platform (or just to the Windows platform), it's not necessarily a myth.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It's amazing that the most awesome ideas stem from the most basic ideas. I'm still amazed at how electricity works, and we continue to advance way beyond that.
http://www.thirdrake.com - Best Webcomic of all time.
OS's keep getting larger too. Vista's going to be 8 gig with a pretty barebones software library pre installed, and my last linux install hit about 6 or 7 gigs. For this to work, you'd have to get OS vendors to cut down their software, or at least segment it across drives. Both are pains to support and you'll have a hard time getting them to do it. Maybe for laptops (non-mechanical storage would be nice).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
While MRAM's speed and power consumption outperform DRAM and Flash, I still don't know if I'd be fully comfortable with MRAM replacing devices specifically built for portability and ease of use. If these are to replace current uses for other types of memory such as Flash, would we have to worry about close proximity with anything magnetic? Would I not be able to carry my MRAM based phone, MP3 player, or USB drive in a single pocket, or nearby pockets?
Prove it.
Yeah, well, wait until the user installs some 100 pieces of spyware on it, because he still doesn't read dialog boxes before clicking "Yes". Add a few viruses, trojans and spam zombies as he still believes that all those people sending him
Now watch that machine take 15 minutes to boot and load all that crap.
Now imagine having MRAM. Imagine just hitting the power button and _instantly_ having all that spyware up. I mean, wow, the monitor is just finishing warming up and you already have your first pop-up windows waiting to sell you "H3rb@l \/i@gr@" or penis enlargement pills or "Hundreds Of Barely Legal Teens Waiting For You!!!" In fact, one has already taken the liberty of opening your browser and redirecting it to that site already. All before even the monitor warmed up. Now _that_ is progress
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What don't ppl get about having their os on a ramdrive that can survive a reboot. Mine is on a 15k disk, thanks to this attitude that hard drives need to be at least a terabyte I was able to pick up a 15k disk brand new for 75$. suckahs.
Then I splurged, and bought a 32! It cost $50. Today, $50 will get you a gigabyte.
My camera today cannot even store 1 picture on a 16 megabyte card.
If this technology accelerates anywhere near the pace of flash (and considering the usefulness of it in all kinds of fields, it may), we'll all be using mram or similar in a few years and look back at DRAM as those quaint old days, much like using floppies...
-
For embedded systems, the really big draw here is the speed. EEPROM is great, but you have to have long delays after writing (~10ms usually) where the data sheet from freescale shows the entire write cycle at less than 35ns! That, plus true random access writes (unlike the Flash page read/modify/write method) is great news for embedded systems developers.
Like pi? Try 10,000 digits.
How much of a myth is it when you use least common denominator, portable file systems like FAT?
A decent flash disk will have write-spreading as a layer on top of the filesystem, so it will remap sectors on the fly to avoid wearout.
I like my memory the way it is. Just make me a cheap solid-state hard drive & stop beating around the bush. The whole RPM thing on hard drives has to go.
No moving parts.
I heard this same story back in the 90s when a friend I know invested in a similar company with what sounds like exactly the same product. Wonder-ram that never looses its memory! It also never came out due to whatever issues, perhaps marketing. And all the investors lost there loot. -and that's my story
Kill your TV
* as small (i.e. as hight density) as DRAM; single MRAM memory cell is two magnets instead of two conductors of capacitor in DRAM, but the (theoretical) size is of the same order of magnitude
Not at present. MRAM's have a problem with cells influencing and flipping the values of their neighbors. To combat this effect, designers have resorted to using some rather complex shapes that are difficult to scale down.
* much less energy-hungry than SRAM, DRAM and Flash while working; when not working it can keep information at least as well as Flash
No way. Current MRAM devices read by sensing current. They are much more power hungry than DRAM, SRAM, or flash.
To summerise, MRAM's
- High Power
- Poor density
+ Non volitile
+ Radiation resistant
The last one is what is driving current consumption. They are used in space appliations. The first two are deal breakers for most non-space applications. Major breakthroughs are required before you see MRAM in your desktop or notebook.
Gee I hope Motorola execs start biting their knuckles sometime soon. Those knuckleheads managed to spin off what's probably the last innovative and profitable division they had. Now they just make crappy phones.
This would work nicely with supercomputers.
Maybe this could increase speeds by x2 ?
The great thing about core memory was its tolerance to water.
Core memory is also immune to electromagnetic radiation--and EMP would wipe out conventional memory but ferrite cre memories would retain their data. IIRC spacecraft make use of core memory in certain applications to this day for that reason.
Core memory is nasty in some ways too--besides being bulky and a bit slow and reads being destructive operations they were temperature sensitive--the current required to flip bits varies with temperature. If you used core memory in an environment where temperature varied too greatly you'd have to include a feedback loop with a thermistor to control the current level used to drive the address lines. I'm kinda like Woz...all that messy analogue stuff makes my brain ache and I like to avoid it. I'm glad that new magnetic memories don't require this sort of messy stuff.
I understand this is what Windows Vista says the first time it fires up... "mmmmmm, ram". Feed me Seymore!
TT
And it seems to me that actually FAT32 is superior for this purpose because it does not try reordering the filesystem to "defrag" it like an inode one would. And since the fragmentation that occurs with FAT32 can be ignored in a random access space like a flash drive, it really does seem ideal?
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
"Mram chips could one day be used in PCs to store an operating system, allowing computers to start up faster when switched on."." Like ROM did many many years ago? I mean, Acorn Archimedes: power switch on: .... beep, and presto, the desktop. Modules could be upgraded by loading them of harddisk, or buying a new ROM set (or burning your own).
Perl Programmer for hire
I don't think you could even find a USB flash drive as small as 32MB any more. You can get a 256MB or 512MB from ebay for $15-$30 or so. What are you waiting for?
Now that we have someone trying to make core memory new again, what's next?
Miniature mercury delay lines in the next iPod?
I'm going to hold out for the new storage-scope notebook.
Whatever happened to bubble-memory anyway? It looked cool under a microscope.
Anyone thought about this yet? I'm no expert but it sounds like having the OS constantly loaded into MRAM would be a trojan writers dream.
what the fuck? admins, ban this twat
what the fuck? admins, ban this twat
allowing computers to start up faster when switched on.'" ...and malware to stick better too.
RE: your sig.
I pretty much think web sites that lock crap down how they liked it (I assume drunk and on 1322x906 or other odd res monitor) are bad myself, ESPECIALLY the ones that do the whole microtype thing.
However if you're not stuck using IE or some other braindead browser you can get around this. I set firefox up to enforce MY prefered minimum font sizes ( also CTRL+ and CTRL-).
Just a thought I hope helps.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
16 mbit ain't 16 meg.
It is only 2megs.
It sounds brilliant, could you provide a reference?
Thanks in advance.