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New "PRAM" 30 Times Faster Than Flash

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the faster-cheaper-longer-lasting dept.

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.

3 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Advantages by duerra · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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  2. Errata + Info + Opinion by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

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  3. Good by MindStalker · · Score: 5, Funny

    Cause I'm sick of how long it takes to load those damn Flash ads that hang over my browser window.