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Intel Set To Demo PRAM

Posted by kdawson on from the flashier dept.

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."

29 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Quite the demo by stratjakt · · Score: 5, Funny

    The guy is going to look like a real froot-loop.

    --
    I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  2. AMD set to reply by bad_fx · · Score: 3, Funny

    AMD have announced they will shortly demo "BABYCARRIAGE" in response.

  3. PRAM is new? by Xenex · · Score: 4, Funny

    Apple have been putting it in Macs for years!

    1. Re:PRAM is new? by holle2 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well:

      Apple PRAM == Parameter RAM
      Intel PRAM == Phase-change RAM

      While:
      Parameter RAM == Any kind of conventional (probably non volatile) RAM
      Phase-change RAM == New kind of non volatile RAM using a new phase change technology

      Thus:
      Apple PRAM != Phase-change RAM

      QUED.

    2. Re:PRAM is new? by jrumney · · Score: 4, Funny

      PRAM is so last year. I'm into PUSHCHAIR already, and looking forward to move to TRICYCLE real soon now.

    3. Re:PRAM is new? by Hal_Porter · · Score: 4, Funny

      I believe Xenex was pretending to confuse two acronyms for humourous effect.

      I suggest you add him to a list of humans that use humour, and ensure your emotion emulator is powered up before replying to posts by humans on that list in future. It is very important that the humans here do not realise that we are not like them.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    4. Re:PRAM is new? by carpe_noctem · · Score: 2, Informative

      Not to nitpick your post, but I thought you'd like to know that it's QED, not QUED... it's short for "quod erat demonstrandum", from Latin. :)

      --
      "Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
    5. Re:PRAM is new? by Ant+P. · · Score: 4, Funny

      Apple *does* have phase-changing RAM... it changes from solid to smoke, you'll only see it in certain laptops with sony batteries though

  4. Hope it is better than Intel's other memory push by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  5. Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured by asliarun · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A lay question, and I had asked this question in the previous /. thread about PRAM, but did not get an answer..

    How are Intel and others managing this chalcogenide glass manufacturing in their usual silicon DRAM process? Is this glass fused/bonded to silicon or something? Or is it an alloy.. and if so, is it a non-silicon alloy (silicon is a non-metal)?

    I tried the wikipedia entry on this subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_memory) , but couldn't completely understand:-
    a. How it really works in an electronic circuit and in a microprocessor (how do you control the heating/cooling at the chip level so that phase change occurs)?
    b. How it is supposed to be volume manufactured? Would they require a new fab entirely to manufacture PRAM (if they do decide to commercialize this technology), or can an existing fab be retro-fitted to support this manufacturing process?

    Appreciate any insights on this subject. At a high level, this does sound like a very exciting new technology.

    1. Re:Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Informative

      I found this paper.

      http://www.ovonyx.com/tech_html.html

      It sounds like the chalcogenide is deposited as a thin film. Mind you they talk about transistors, so it must be an extra processing stage on a normal chip.

      This seems to confirm it
      http://www.eetimes.com/in_focus/silicon_engineerin g/OEG20030919S0044
      Chalcogenide RAM is nonvolatile, boasts access speed comparable to that of DRAM and possesses advantages in scalability, high sensing margin, low energy consumption and endurance to cycling. The structure and processing of chalcogenide memory are much simpler than in other next-generation memories such as MRAM and ferroelectric RAM. In a chalcogenide memory cell, the data is stored in a flat chalcogenide layer that can be deposited near the end of the CMOS interconnect process. Therefore, disturbance of the CMOS process is minimal, making it ideal for systems-on-chip.

      So I guess they add an extra step to the end of the process and deposit a layer of chalcogenide glass.

      These things sound really cool BTW, they're writable at a byte granularity in tens of nanoseconds just like a regular SDRAM, but they are non volatile. It looks like they can flip bits individually either way too.

      Whereas flash memory is much slower - tens of microseconds per byte, and you need to erase 16K-128Kbyte block at a time. And PRAM is supposed to be denser and allow unlimited erase cycles.

      Plus Intel is backing it so it's not like it will fail because the vendor can't afford to scale the production process to make chips with a high capacity.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
    2. Re:Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured by LaughingCoder · · Score: 5, Funny

      How are Intel and others managing this chalcogenide glass manufacturing in their usual silicon DRAM process? Is this glass fused/bonded to silicon or something?
      If that is your idea of a lay question, I'd hate to be hit with one of your "expert" questions.
      --
      The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
    3. Re:Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured by Khyber · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's not unlimited in writing. It's got an expected life of 10^8 writes/reads. I've been watching this for years, now, and I'm surprised nobody even bothered to check some of my previous posts that mentioned this technology beforehand. I'm already using an Ovonix-made test drive in this machine - Windows loads up within 4 seconds. On my 5400 RPM 80 gig HDD, it takes about 14 seconds. VAST improvement, and yet another breaking of the bottleneck in hard drives. I couldn't be happier.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    4. Re:Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured by Mystic+Pixel · · Score: 2, Informative

      The structure of the silicon wafer is, in certain respects, similar to glass. The main difference is that "glass" (in the everyday sense) is an amorphous solid -- the atoms are basically jumbled together -- whereas the atoms in wafer silicon form a regular crystal lattice. The upshot of this is that, with a little cleverness, it's easy to deposit a wide variety of different substances in a layer on top of an exposed wafer surface, and have them stick fairly well. And, depending on the characteristics of said substance, selectively removing it (via chemical etching or a more advanced process) isn't difficult, either. There are a number of technical concerns that must be addressed in order to integrate this into an existing fabrication process, but it's far from impossible (in fact, it's not even too difficult, it's just kind of expensive. But production volume makes up for that.)

    5. Re:Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured by frank_adrian314159 · · Score: 4, Funny
      If that is your idea of a lay question, I'd hate to be hit with one of your "expert" questions...

      What!? Don't tell me you're scared of fringe effects on leakage current, non-linear C-V models, and photo mask correction factors! Sheesh! Nerds these days...

      --
      That is all.
    6. Re:Question on how PRAM works and is manufactured by Hal_Porter · · Score: 2, Informative

      Read the paper

      http://www.st.com/stonline/products/literature/an/ 10122.pdf

      and this one

      http://newslab.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~johnson/public_fil es/R-FLO436_Chang.pdf

      Because I wouldn't mind getting a flash drive. I'm just a bit skeptical.

      Well it wouldn't surprise me if some flash disks get this disasterously wrong to be honest. Some of the lifetimes on page 6 of the Chang paper look a bit low for comfort - around 4 years for NFTL.

      --
      echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
  6. Again? by maxwell+demon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Well, we've already seen MRAM and FeRAM, both already in production. None of them seem to have replaced Flash or even DRAM yet. So what is it about PRAM that one should expect it to be different?

    BTW, is there anywhere a concise table comparing the characteristics of different RAM technologies?

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    1. Re:Again? by SnowZero · · Score: 4, Informative

      Well it looks like PRAM is already winning on the practicality front. Two companies have PRAM chips at 128Mb or larger, and claim good density numbers. MRAM has only reached ~16Mb last I knew (although smaller ones can be bought right now). FeRAM, at least from Wikipedia, seems to suffer from density problems, as it can only be built on 350nm generation fabs (i.e. very old).

      The only thing not mentioned is cost, but if it scales (Intel thinks it does), and the special glass just adds only one step to manufacturing (which the original developer claims), it doesn't look like there are too many roadblocks to success. Now, claiming it will replace DRAM may be a little premature, however there's a good hope they can replace flash at least.

    2. Re:Again? by Khyber · · Score: 3, Informative

      You're not replacing DRAM with this stuff. DRAM is meant for far more read/write cycles than what this can do. This is a replacement for storage, not random access memory, due to the limited 10^8 read-write cycles (which any idling computer would eat up just running processes within a few days, or could go thru just running one game given sufficient complexity) As an upside, I'm playing with a test drive made by Ovonyx right now - Things load so fast you'd think "When did Windows become so damned efficient and speedy?" Four second boot time? Oh hell yes!

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  7. Clarification by Xiroth · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just to clarify (I'm an insta-buff on the subject from the wikipedia article), despite having RAM in its name this is more a storage solution than a memory solution.

    I'm generally more a software person than hardware, but there's a lot to be excited about with this. It's apparently got a r/w time only 2-3 times the time of DRAM, and holds a lot of potential for things like paging files and storing frequently used software since there doesn't seem to be a limitation on the number of writes that can be applied. Once things develop, the technology might even be a ludicrous-speed replacement for hard-drives, as the storage mechanism is quite stable (more so than flash). I can definitely see this taking off in the future, if it delivers what it promises (and nothing else supercedes it in the meantime).

  8. Of course they have a demo... by absolut_kurant · · Score: 2

    ...cause they have to push the PRAM a lot...

    --
    Yes.
  9. Here's the issue by Bozdune · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Here's the issue by hackstraw · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Here's the issue by jhfry · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I used to maintain an IBM Pi2 Mini Computer that had drum storage up until the late 90's. I really like the idea, a read/write head per track eliminated all seeking and made for very predictable response times for our real time processing requirements.
      I would love to see the hard drive industry start incorporating more read heads in to drives.

      Imagine a single drive with two armatures, servo's and read/write heads. You could effectively double the throughput, reduce seek times, and improve latency. It would be like having RAID 1 read speeds, and write speeds faster than a single conventional disk.

      If they could change the form factor and make the enclosure square, they could shove 4 read/write mechinisms in a single drive increasing it to 4x throughput.

      The only reason I can imagine for why this hasn't been done is that there are alignment issues with multiple heads on the same surface, or it's prohibitively more expensive than a good raid controller and multiple drives (which I doubt).

      --
      Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
  10. How? Intel is a supermassive chip company w/FABS. by burnttoy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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".

    --
    Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
  11. Power consumption info by RepCentral · · Score: 2, Informative

    Power consumption specs for programming PRAM are not stated in many places but
    I was able to find a reference here:
    http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/051213.html

    And for comparison to flash memory, here is the 512Mb 1.8v part from ST Micro:
    http://www.st.com/stonline/products/literature/ds/ 10058/nand512r3a.pdf

    The specs do not line up exactly.
    PRAM: 100uA at 1.5V for programming each bit cell
    FLASH: 8ma at 1.8V for programing one page (256 bytes), internally rebuffered in SRAM

  12. Re:Question on how to pronounce that word by mnemotronic · · Score: 2
    chalcogenide

    chal-ko-gen'-ide ?
    chal-cog'-en-ide ?
    sh-alko'-gen-ide ?
    fawstuh-grhants-dhaling ?

    --
    The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
  13. Should be Purchasable RAM by Mike+Zilva · · Score: 2, Funny

    this was it should be available since it was first invented...

  14. Re:Question on how to pronounce that word by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 3, Funny

    There's this new thing called a "dictionary". They even have them online for free nowadays. According to www.dictionary.com (which pulled its entry from the Random House Unabridged) it's KAL-_kuh_-_juh_-nayhd as the preferred pronounciation, but you can also say kal-KOJ-_uh_-nayhd.

    Chris Mattern