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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
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...
This held its data for years after it was powered off.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
From what I am remembering, Freescale began small batch sampling of this kind of 4Mbit MRAM two years or 1 and half years ago, and now a available in large batch.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
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] _
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
"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.
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.
... 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
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.
I worked on magnetic bubble development before IBM canceled their program. it was a matter of finding a commercial niche.
Magnetic bubbles did exist and were sold and used in computers. But at the time their was no niche for them like their is flashram. bubbles were faster than disks but more expensive and slower than ram but cheaper. Thus they got caught in a squeeze play. Although they consumed no current when off they were not particularly low power devices so they were not suited for battery powered devices. It's the latter that allows flashram to get a commerical foothold around which it has matured.
Mram is supposedly going to be faster then ram and consume less power. So it too may have a niche that eluded bubbles. it's main competitor is not flash or disk but ram I think.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.