Gaining RAM For Free, Through Software

wakaramon writes with a piece from IEEE Spectrum about an experimental approach to squeezing more usable storage out of a device's existing RAM; the researchers were using a Linux-based PDA as their testbed, and claim that their software "effectively gives an embedded system more than twice the memory it had originally — essentially for free." "Although the price of RAM has plummeted fast, the need for memory has expanded faster still. But if you could use data-compression software to control the way embedded systems store information in RAM, and do it in a way that didn't sap performance appreciably, the payoff would be enormous."

Comments

Software patents

[tepples]

Perhaps timothy just wanted to set up yet another software patent debate. From page 3 of the article, with my emphasis:

Translating these gains from the lab bench to the marketplace has not been a trivial undertaking, however. In January 2007 we filed for patents on the process, which we dubbed CRAMES, for Compressed RAM for Embedded Systems.

I haven't managed to find the patent application yet, but I wonder if Connectix's RAM Doubler product would be considered prior art.