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New "PRAM" 30 Times Faster Than Flash
hairyfeet writes, "The EETimes describes the new Samsung memory, phase-change RAM, called PRAM. Samsung is dubbing it 'Perfect RAM' because it is thirty times faster than NOR flash, ten times more durable — and cheaper to produce, to boot." 512-Mbit modules should be available sometime in 2008. None of the initial coverage goes much beyond Samsung's press release. At the same time, Samsung also announced a 40-nm, 32-Gbit NAND flash device.
It sounds like great marketing and all using the name "PRAM" for "Perfect RAM". However, can anybody tell me what, if any, advantages that this design has over MRAM? I'm all for a replacement of flash, given all of its disadvantages, but I would like to avoid a format war if one format between these two is clearly superior to the other.
A community-oriented lyrics site
1. Someone's getting their MBits and GBits mixed up. Samsung has announced 32-gigabit (4GB) flash chips, not 32 megabit.
2. NAND has traditionally been shunned in many uses because it can usually only be accessed as a block device, and not a standard ROM device. Which makes it unsuitable for many embedded applications. Thus this chip is probably targetted at the thumb drive market.
3. This is exciting stuff! According to the article, PRAM is supposed to have processing speeds similar to RAM, and does not require erasure or sectoring. The only downside is that they don't give any hard figures on what "fast processing speed" means. Depending on what that actually means, we could start seeing machines that are able to instantly hibernate like EROS, but without the added step of writing to disk.
4. The 512 MBit (64MB) device may sound small, but I imagine that more than one chip will be chained together to create a larger storage device. Samsung will probably also work to produce larger chips once they have all the early production issues worked out.
5. The CIO article is already slow, so I'll add one tidbit they had. According to CIO, Samsung is considering PRAM to be a good fit for replaceing Flash memory in mobile phones. Considering the lower price, this could be a good fit. The only question is, does it use more or less power during read/write cycles?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Cause I'm sick of how long it takes to load those damn Flash ads that hang over my browser window.
I have to push the PRAM-a-lot!
The Cheese Stands Alone.
Since a pram is generally used at walking speed, doesn't anyone think of the baby's safety when it's rolling 30 times faster, i.e., 90 miles/hr or 145kph?
Think of the children!
--
BMO
Your PC got harshed, right, 'cause your
system heaps at the wrong parameter.
So l toasted the dated directory,
tweaked the P-RAM...
and reglazed your subroutine.
- Crawl, in "Son In Law" (Pauly Shore)
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker
It's business... they are selling something that does more for only a little more money. That makes them a tidy profit!!! That's what they develop new chips for is PROFIT. In another year or two, the prices will drop to be lower, or we will have devices so large we couldn't have afforded them at all... i.e. price of a 4GB SD card isn't going down any time soon due to complexity of manufactureing.. but the new chips may make 4GB as affordable as 1GB sooner.
The format war would take place with manufacturers and memory producers. Consumers will likely never install pram or mram into their computers just like they don't install flash now. The only time you might buy pram would be a USB flash device, and that already has the standard interface of USB. So really there's no reason consumers would ever have to choose one technology pathway or another. Manufacturers would have to choose, but they're much better prepared to switch technologies and avoid having dead-end technology (they really do this all the time when it makes economic sense).
AccountKiller
Cheaper to produce, my ass. They'll be charging an arm and a leg for this type of memory.
Storage should be stated in megaBYTES and gigaBYTES not bits. No one uses bits anymore, we've all upgraded to bytes. Then there was that half standard of nibbles, what the heck was that all about.
FTA:
You decide.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
CDs and music in general are subject to monopoly rights, and thus have no actual competition. Prices on them will rise to absorb any economic elbow room available, and even worse, the cost structure will adjust to the revenue, essentially negating the entire purpose of a free market economy.
Memory on the other hand is interchangable with other memory, thus subject to a much more fierce competition, which drives prices down.