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Memristor Based RAM Could Be Out By 2009
neural.disruption writes "According to the EETimes, HP is announcing that it 'plans to unveil RRAM prototype chips based on memristors with crossbar arrays in 2009.' I don't know if you remember the earlier story about HP Labs proving the existence of the Memristor that had been predicted in 1971 by Leon Chua, and has the nice property of maintaining a memory of the current that passes by it. This could bring us a new type of small non-volatile high-speed RAM at low cost because of the low complexity of the mechanism employed."
True, it's probably not a good idea to have ALL your memory as this stuff, but why not have say, the core OS files (The ones that wont contain any important, private data) stored in this type of memory for that near-instant-on effect? In theory, the OS could stay in RAM and just do a quick verification check to make sure it's not damaged/corrupted in some way (and since it's ALREADY in RAM, it should be lightning quick) and then reload any files that have been, then boom, you're at your desktop in a matter of seconds.
Plus, I doubt it'll actually be as fast as regular RAM anyway, that would be too good to be true, so chances are we'll just see this as a companion to good ol' DDR3/4/WhateverExistsAtTheTime.
It would certainly benefit the likes of embedded devices, set-top boxes and such that are starting to really take the piss with their multi-minute startup times.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
If this stuff actually works as promised, it will be way faster and longer-lived (in terms of write cycles) than flash. 50nS is pretty slow compared to DRAM, but for flash replacement it should be pretty zippy. Especially if there's no need to do block erase and rewrites.
So don't let people have physical access to your computer. Or invest in a thermite/C4 charge inside your computer. Or both.
---- Liquid was a patriot ----
An emerging technology being offered at low cost? I highly doubt it. Not that it isn't a simple mechanism (at least according to the article), but I can't imagine anyone selling them for less than the cost of standard RAM...at least, not for a few years or heavy adoption.
Unless, of course, you're waking a computer out of hibernate mode... then it's pretty much all about disk I/O throughput.
If this were possible, it could basically become unnecessary to actually *shut down* your computer.
More importantly, if you suddenly lose (or switch off) power it might be possible to simply pick up where you left off - with some minor firmware tweaks to get the hardware running again without wiping RAM.
=Smidge=
It's not a matter of patience, it's a matter of eliminating a needlessly slow bottleneck on a system.
To expand upon the GP's point, if you could take 100GB of this stuff and slap it into your memory space you'd never, really, have to hit the hard disk for applications again. This does two things:
- Frees up your DRAM for things that actually change frequently.
- Frees up your hard disk which should be holding things that need long term storage, not execution.
Pair it with 8GB of DRAM or so and I can't see any problems. Sure you'd have to design filesystems to support it, but some already exist with the basic ideas implemented.
"Managing to shave 5 seconds off boot? Not so much so, especially since it offers no other concrete advantages once you're booted"
What if you're a kernel, or bootloader developer? Saving 5 out of 20 seconds boot time means you're spending 25% less time waiting while you're testing. And that was just off the top of my head!
"we're back to having to load that memory check routine from another source"
That's really not that big a deal.
"of the most popular pipe dreams of these ideas? Do we have a set of checks for each file in there? Where did we store it? How long will it take to check it? Are we recalculating it constantly on the fly...?"
Um... ZFS? End to end checksumming? Pipe dream? Just because you've not heard of it being done, doesn't make it magic.
"might as well just keep its system state on a pair of revolving images on the hard disk anyways" ...because harddrives don't fail or need to be checked?
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia