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One Step Closer To Speedier, Bootless Computers
CWmike writes "Physicists at the University of California at Riverside have made a breakthrough in developing a 'spin computer,' which would combine logic with nonvolatile memory, bypassing the need for computers to boot up. The advance could also lead to super-fast chips. The new transistor technology, which one lead scientist believes could become a reality in about five years, would reduce power consumption to the point where eventually computers, mobile phones and other electronic devices could remain on all the time. The breakthrough came when scientists at UC Riverside successfully injected a spinning electron into a resistor material called graphene, which is essentially a very thin layer of graphite. The graphene in this case is one-atom thick. The process is known as 'tunneling spin injection.' A lead scientist for the project said the clock speeds of chips made using tunneling spin injection would be 'thousands of times' faster than today's processors. He describes the tech as a totally new concept that 'will essentially give memory some brains.'"
Does this mean my Windows machine will catch viruses before they're even released?
Is it wrong that as fast as things as changing these days, part of me still hopes for one of these '1000x faster in 5 years' technologies to live up to its full promise?
I know it's coming; if not this tech than surely another one... I guess one hopes to live in interesting times, and I still dream for the day I wake up and there's a computer for sale that shatters Moore's Law. A computer 1000x faster than what was available the day before.
Faster, please.
(and thank you)
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
My mobile phone already is on all the time. So are most of my computers.
Graphene is going to turn out to be a 'before graphene/after graphene' landmark in history.
*DrugCheese rants*
am i the only one who read the title and thought that PR firms and politicians could be in serious trouble?
So, this is becoming a trend. Bad summary. It's not an outright lie, just misleading. From reading the article, one might get the sense that we might see this in products in 5 years. However, the article actually states that the guy said:
"I'm one of those researchers that really cringes at the thought of saying this [new technology] can be useful. I think for us, maybe within five years we can get one device working."
So, the guy is realistic, and not a douche. "We can maybe get one working in 5 years" is not the same as seeing it in devices in 5 years (which, again, wasn't explicitly stated in the summary, but i feel like thats what people would think).
In reality, we might get something in products in 10 years.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Another minor bit of progress in materials science being blown up into a revolutionary advance. We get about one of these every two weeks. Right now, these guys have a one-bit device that consumes more power than DRAM. They really should hold off on the press releases until they're further along. Maybe this will be useful, and maybe it won't be.
It's stuff like this that gives nanotechnology a bad name.
for a scientist or engineer to say, a reality in 5 years, if he was referring to ready-for-production or the first trickle to concept models in technology product expos. But the one about 'You can keep them powered on', it's like a game changer from out of left field. Maybe booting will become irrelevant by then?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Will this new technology finally bring us to our beloved flying cars?
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
He describes the tech as a totally new concept that 'will essentially give memory some brains.
Computer memory combined with logic gates.
Close, but not what I need - I need something to give my brain some memory!
For that matter, wouldn't any non-volatile, high speed memory device do the job?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
What excuse do I use now to go and make my morning cup of coffee without looking like a slacker?
even today's mainstream cpus are far more powerful than what our everyday tasks involve. even the fps-hungry gaming crowd has been reaching perceptive limits in regard to human eye, and the frame rate has become a sport, a statistical value.
unless society takes on seti, parallel computing etc as hobbies, we wont need more processing power in our daily lives.
Read radical news here
slashdot = stagnated
eat all CPU power available and can eat couple of order of magnitude more.
If you played Fallout 3, you would know that a plasma rifle wouldn't vaporize you. It would melt you into a puddle of goo. Now a laser rifle can vaporize you...
"He describes the tech as a totally new concept that 'will essentially give memory some brains."
So...
In Soviet Russia brain gives you memory?
We both said a lot of things that you are going to regret.
Shock and horror! Where will I stick the dead bodies? And the horse's head? Damned progress!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
UCR? Psh. Tell me when Berkeley has something up and running.
I'd settle for speedier, botless computers.
Aaaand if you played Fallout 2, you would know that a plasma rifle would melt you, a laser rifle would cut you up and a pulse rifle would vaporize you...
The earliest computers had non-volatile memory, but that is where the booting process originates from!
The word "booting" comes from the word "bootstrap" which was the tiny program you had to toggle in (with binary switches for the register and the address) into memory, which you could start and which would then load the OS from punch cards.
The memory was still filled, but you did not know what with. So the computer's memory was basically a swamp, and it had to pull itself out with its own bootstraps, like Baron von Münchhausen. Hence the name.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
does it run linux?
. .
Someone complained about the "five years" thingie.
Now to the
injected a spinning electron
Now tell us: how did they make the electron spin?
Thought so.
Not only are its limitations insignificant for the average (non-power) user, but unless you do something daft like reflash the O/S, there's little in the way of screwing it up, either. Maybe instead of looking forwards to Windows Mobile 7, Android, iOS etc. we should take a step back and consider not what's possible but what we actually want?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
replace your volatile memory with FRAM and problem solved! though it may cost more money than you can make in your lifetime. ;)
Bootless computers are a reality. The operating system needs to be written in flash memory (or ROM, with flash
memory patching). It's simple. The boot time of popular OSes stems from two reasons: Microsoft is a technically uninspired desktop OS monopoly; Linux has server origins and Linux on the desktop is nothing but an uninspired copycat of an uninspired MS implementation.
The Commodore 64 featured a bootless design like 30 years ago.
A pulsed laser rifle, on the other hand, would be used to write morse code on your corpse!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
So, all very nice, we'll be able to have always-on computers that don't pig out on energy, BUT...
How much of the software we use can handle running for long periods of time without crashing? Not many, in my experience.
What with memory leaks, bounds overflows and who knows what else, some of which may be an oversight in your own code, but more likely is a bug inside some library you're using, or a compiler bug, or linker bug, or...
As anybody who has tried it and knows, writing software that runs for weeks and months on end without restarting is really quite hard. And it's no bloody use if the hardware can stay up for months on end if the software can't.
(And, not having used Windows in about 14 years, I'm not talking about that piece of shite.)
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
oh c'mon nobody wants to play your educational games!
You may not need to *boot*, but as long as you run MS software you'll always need to REboot.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Computers needing to "boot" is a relatively modern invention caused in part by hardware hotplug, backwards compatibility modes and reliability checks.
Most of the boot process is:
- Moving out of legacy modes (e.g. enabling increased capabilities from basic instructions sets to full modern ones, enabling different memory access models, enabling 64-bit etc.), ramping up core speed, enabling things like DMA and moving from "safe" memory timings to those that the chips report they can support when the negotiations finally take place, bringing up the non-boot CPU's, etc.
- Contention. Doing only a certain number of things on the bus at any one time, making the buses serial, making the buses have sub-buses and other ideas. Sometimes there is no quicker way to do things. Sometimes it *will* take 1000ms before the disk will respond that it's up to speed.
- Checking that RAM does indeed do what it's told, that a boot loader is present, that a floppy is present (yes, even on some modern BIOS's), checking IDE/SATA channels and retrieving capabilities, checking memory timings, checking PCI and USB buses, checking that disks are spinning, etc.
Some of my servers take up to 3 minutes to get to the point where they can actually load the first byte from disk to begin loading it. A lot of this time is BIOS handoff to the BIOS on the RAID cards (and sometimes the network cards), those RAID cards checking, assembling and enabling the drives, etc. With two RAID cards, we've just nearly doubled boot time. Proper (reasonable) memory checks of several GB of RAM still takes a while, even for a simple test. And yet there's still a minute or so of absolute complete waste as we start in some 8086 legacy mode and slowly have to ramp up disks, cards and our own CPU's, not to mention external hardware like USB and DVD drives "just in case". And then the OS has to go and do it all itself again later anyway.
This is why things like the LinuxBIOS (now called Coreboot) project actually work better and faster - when we KNOW what the BIOS needs to do, we find that lots of it is done twice, lots of it are unnecessary, lots of it can be delayed until we actually NEED the DVD drive, some of it can occur in the background because it will ALWAYS take a long time to start etc. But how many fixed sets of hardware does that project actually work on? Few. Because not only is it tricky to do that sort of analysis, but it's tricky to lock-down exactly what the BIOS needs to do and do better than the original BIOS.
We can have an "instant on" computer. It's easy. My ZX Spectrum did it nearly 30 years ago. My calculator does it now. The Psion organisers all did it. Most portable games consoles manage it. The thing you have to realise though is that it means: booting into a single, fixed OS that's tricky to upgrade, making power management apply to every process perfectly, fixing a set of hardware down that we know can always boot into a certain configuration very quickly, changing the way that all our chips work so they start in their best mode, not their worst (and thus probably destroying things like OS installers as we know them and making them specific to a machine type - no more installers modern OS on old computers, or old OS on modern computers), removing any sort of consistency checks and having to rely on things not going wrong or the hardware being able to handle all hardware errors (e.g. ECC memory for everything with reporting of anything it can't handle), and building every component so it doesn't "negotiate" or "initialise" but just works (e.g. even a keyboard controller can take some time to come back online at the moment, not to mention graphics, disks, USB buses, etc.).
Instant-on computers are always possible, and some of them are very useful for certain things. But generic PC's and instant-on won't happen until CPU's, disks and bus negotiations take literally fractions of a second for any operation (and thus we still do as many instructions to initialise but they take clock cycles
I don't want to sound like your usual get-off-my-lawn but in the in the days of home computers you could switch it on and it would be ready literally in under a second. Yes I know the "OS" was probably only 16K in size or less but it was in ROM and the computer didn't bother with pointless self checking (you'll soon know if some hardware on your PC isn't working).
Even early DOS machines could boot in mere seconds. So really all this very complicated technology is doing is bringing us back to where we were 20 or 30 years ago.
Plus ca change.
My computer resumes from suspend in under a second. For true hibernate it could load pages on demand from flash and it wouldn't be much slower. This is a solved problem.
While this technology sounds quite interesting and(assuming it pans out outside the lab) will definitely shake up the world of tiny embedded devices, smart dusts, bridge bolts that you can set SNMP traps on, etc. it will be very interesting to see whether or not, and how quickly, it shakes up the world of "computers" in the more or less conventional "you sit in front of it and type at the intertubes" sense.
For years now, we've had computers that can(albeit by much lower tech means) be said to have "non volatile memory". Every cheap-shit laptop out there can keep its RAM contents alive for at least 24 hours on a half-full battery, and most desktops can do the same until a brownout or blackout hits, which isn't often in much of the world. It's a brute force approach, the RAM isn't actually non-volatile; but from the user experience perspective it might as well be(with the exception of the fact that a laptop on standby will eventually eat its battery, while a truly nonvolatile one would only self-discharge at the natural rate for Li-Ion cells).
And yet, people spend a lot of time booting computers, and even bringing them out of sleep tends to take several seconds, between spinning up drives, waiting for various devices(which are almost all computers in their own right, these days) to settle and start talking on various busses, checking IPs and DHCP leases on one or more wired and/or wireless connections, etc.
I have to wonder if, outside of systems built, from the ground up, logic and software, for truly nonvolatile operation, how much of a difference this will actually make for computers large enough that we think of them as such(as said initially, nonvolatile logic/state will rock the world of truly low-power embedded stuff). Particularly with the emphasis on network connectivity in most modern applications, your computer/device is often only modestly useful until it has finished negotiating with whatever sort of network it connects to. Even if it can go from off to on in a millisecond or less, DHCP, if ethernet, authentication+DHCP, if wifi, and whatever freaky stuff has to happen for various cellular services takes time, sometimes 10s of seconds. Either you leave your NICs on all the time, or you eat that delay. Not to mention the (rarer than they used to be; but still occasionally seen) pathological cases of peripherals that just get confused or, more commonly, just don't come out of sleep quite right. Wifi devices and graphics cards seem to be the worst, but if you take a large sample set of laptops and sleep and wake them often enough, you'll see all kinds of weird waking-on-the-very-wrong-side-of-the-bed behavior. Worse with really cheap and nasty peripherals, or drivers based on reverse-engineering and vendor hostility; but happens occasionally even on the oh-so-integrated macs. Currently, a reboot, or a hard power cut/battery removal at worst, will always flush state and sort them out; but truly nonvolatile devices will either have to be a great deal better engineered and more reliable, or include some sort of watchdog that can forcibly flush the state of a malfunctioning device...
Now I just need to install Gentoo on it with my new CFLAGS and I will have the fastest operating system in the world on the fastest booting computer in the world!
... I read "botless" ... and my first thought was, "dude, we already have Macs!"...
When i read this all I could think of the previous article about how a large company would not sponser the inventor of graphene but rather patent him out of existance. http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101007/full/news.2010.525.html So it begins I would expect
There is no technical reason bootless could not be implemented today, with the OS in flash and appropriate pagemapping to RAM for r/w pages.
However, one of the main reasons for rebooting is to clear out OS corruption (some OSes and configs are more succeptible than others) and this functionality would need to be added back.
My guess is that graphene is going to make the manufacturing of computers and chips much less expensive and reducing the price of computers even further. I predict that pretty soon a super-fast, always on laptop will cost around $99.00 in the near future.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
so, pardon my lack of depth. But, why are bootless computers so important ? Is it merely "convenience factor" - bullock cart as opposed to an auto-mobile ? Or, are there technical problems whose solutions depend on bootless computers ? For example, accurate time keeping does have important implications in certain fields (astronomy, navigation, etc.)
My characters always had the Bloody Mess perk. There was never enough of a corpse left to write on.
Unless you live in backward MS country, booting is already only for adding new hardware or changing the kernel (on servers) and saving power (on desktops and laptops). Linux machines routinely get uptimes > 1 year. I personally had 400 days on a well-used Linux server 5 years ago.
If you live on MS island, however, regular booting will not go away for a long, long time, because the long-term stability is just not there. I highly doubt that MS has the competence to create it in the first place, as they have now consistently failed over a number of OS incarnations. And think of all the occasions where they want a reboot. Think that is for show? I don't. I think this is th expression f a fundamentally flawed OS design.
So whether you run Windows or a real OS, "bootless" computers are either not feasible or not needed at all. Another group of "scientists" bringing things to the world that nobody needs.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hey, Monkey Island taught me a great deal about pirates.
All glory to Arstotzka!
we should start working on flying cars because they would be cooler than a "bootless" computer because i already have one its called don't turn it off = O
Von Neumann spinning in his grave? ;)
From TFA: "The researchers also need to build out the circuitry. That will be the job of electrical engineers."
Really? Whoda thunkit?
Free Martian Whores!
I dont think bone melts, or if it does, I dont see why focused photons would do a better job of vaporizing you than ultra hot ionized gases would.
You must not have seen The IT Crowd then.
You are supposed to answer the phone with "IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?"
For a desktop I don't find myself wishing that I didn't have to boot. It only takes about 20 seconds (excluding GRUB) anyway.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
I remember (my) Amiga had instant boot at powerup just by having its OS in ROM.
OK it did run a startup script but that just kicked off stuff that applied user-specific customisations to the desktop environment you got immediately at power-on.
That was maybe 20 years ago. I'm still waiting for other computers to catch up.
I dont think bone melts
Neither do any valuable items. You can conveniently loot the pile of goo immediately after gooification!