Intel Set To Demo PRAM

xavatarx writes "Intel's chief technology officer Justin Rattner is set to give the first public demonstration of the company's PRAM (phase-change RAM) technology at this week's Intel Developer Forum conference. 'Intel and other companies are counting on PRAM to replace both NOR and NAND flash memory to generate the demand required to produce the new memory chips in volume, and drive down costs,' the article says."

Comments

Hope it is better than Intel's other memory push

[EmbeddedJanitor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_memory

Here's the issue

[Bozdune]

There have been lots of proposals to use "slow RAM" throughout the years, and there's even been real hardware that tried to take advantage of it in various ways.

A interesting example is the IBM 2301 drum memory device. Originally used as main memory, 2301's were later converted to paging devices. They had great transfer rates, but they became obsolete as soon as RAM sizes increased enough to cache a reasonable number of pages.

The reason is that even though "slow RAM" like drum memory seems intuitively useful as a "third stage" paging device, if you do the math versus the two-stage combination of very fast RAM and very much slower disk, you find that the RAM/disk combo performs almost as well. The conclusion therefore has been that it makes little sense to throw away your money on medium-speed RAM, because you'd have gotten more bang for the buck by spending it either on (a) more fast main memory, or (b) bigger/better disks.

Finally, if you look at history, the rotating storage industry continues to confound all of these "fast RAM" technologies by increasing performance and dropping $/bit at an amazing rate. Nothing is more primitive, to my mind, than spinning a disk platter in 2007 -- but there's still nothing better, and the technology shows no sign of dying.

Re:Here's the issue

[hackstraw]

Nothing is more primitive, to my mind, than spinning a disk platter in 2007 -- but there's still nothing better, and the technology shows no sign of dying.

In working with large numbers of computers over the years, here are my informal statistics for failure. 1) hard drives 2) power supplies 3) other, almost at the noise level

And look at what the industry adds redundancy for in computers. 1) hard drives and 2) power supplies.

Sure, anyone that thinks about it will agree that spinning disk platters in 2007 is primative, but these things currently solve the magical equasion involving the variables of price, performance, longevity, and capacity. In 2007, simply nothing comes close to matching spinning platters with respect to these variables. Whats even funnier, is that in 2007 if you want more storage than a spinning platter can provide, then the thing for you is even more primative. A series of magnetic tapes with a robot to fetch them for you! And with those, you lose a number of things like random access within a file, large latency to retrieving a certain file, and all that.

Personally, I don't see a paradigm shift in storage for 50 years or so. The thing is that tapes and spinning platters keep improving, and people's data storage requirments keep increasing. And in turn, there is a need for faster processors and networks to process and move all this data around.

Once an inexpensive, relatively fast, persistant storage technology hits the market at about 18-64 gigs of space, then servers will snatch that up to be used for paging and for the OS image. There really is a market for that today. But then we are still stuck with spinning platters and magnetic tapes for "data" until something else comes along.

How? Intel is a supermassive chip company w/FABS.

[burnttoy]

Only real men have fabs yadda yadda and Intel probably reckon that for every x86 chip they sell they can sell a couple of gig (or more) of PRAM as well. Intel need stuff for their fabs to manufacture or they cost a lot of money.

There are 2 ways they can win assuming they have the capacity for massive scale manufacturing, which they seem to.

1 - They can undercut the cost of NOR/NAND chips in the market place.
2 - they can sell at price parity with NOR/NAND but solve the serious technical problems with both designs. TBH neither is terribly nice to interface to and both are very slow compared to DRAM. Beating the technical problems are explained to PHB's as Instant Boot (suspend to RAM - except its PRAM, not battery backed DRAM). Quietness. The G shocks required to actually damage the stuff as compared to a spinning HD. etc etc...

Actually there's a lot of reasons to go for it. Not least of all that HD sizes on consumer products (cheapo laptops etc) seem to be stuck at 80 gig. It's cheap and most (not all - I've a terabyte+ of storage and still run out) users will never fill it anyway. Instant boot is a real serious seller - 2 minutes of boot time feels a lot longer as you can't do anything for 2 minutes.

But, personally, I think Intel's massive production capability and their endless search to find something to do with all those billions of transistors is where they'll "win".