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Advance In PCM Memory Could Dramatically Reduce Power Consumption
Zothecula writes "Researchers from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of Illinois have developed new low-power digital memory which uses much less power and is faster than other solutions currently available. The breakthrough could give future consumer devices like smartphones and laptops a much longer battery life, but might also benefit equipment used in telecommunications, science or by the military."
uses much less power and is faster than other solutions currently available
Haven't seen however any info on the speed.
The researchers say that the low-power memory could even lead to previously elusive three-dimensional stacking of chips.
This would be good indeed if achieved.
Speaking of achievements, there's just this snag:
The group has so far created and tested a few hundred bits
On top of it:
The device is also immune to accidental erasure from a passing scanner or magnet.
This may well be, but... what range of temperatures is supported by the phase-change material? (i.e. what good is the low-power/high-speed memory if it melts when overclocking the CPU?)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
TFA explains how to set a bit (from 0 to 1), but not how to clear the bit.
The actual paper in inaccessible to me (without $$$), even from a university, as it is pre-publication. (I think it will become available on the 17th.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
uses much less power and is faster than other solutions currently available
Haven't seen however any info on the speed.
Unless I'm reading it wrong -- and the wording is a bit ambiguous -- they seem to be claiming speeds higher than other PCM implementations, not DRAM. I would be very surprised if the write speed of phase-change memory could ever exceed that of DRAM, and I say write speed because phase-change devices can be read faster than they can be written.
PCM is much more likely to be a SSD solution than a replacement for main memory, and even then, it's a long, long way from leaving the lab. All this announcement concerns is a proof-of-concept.
So, everyone said, if we switch to SSDs, longer battery life. Did it happen? No.
Memory does not use up that much power, relative to the whole system. Even switching a laptop's screen to LEDs doesn't help that much.
It's almost the same as the mythical new invention that will be out "in 5 years".
Give it up people. Semiconductors improve year after year, These kinds of breakthroughs that drastically change everything just don't happen.
The only thing I can think of that made that kind of a change in the last 30 years was going to an SSD drive for speed and responsiveness. Other than that, each year gets a bit better. Don't expect that to change any time soon.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
I, no doubt like most of you, enjoy reading about advancements in technologies. Especially those which can have a direct impact on computer performance!
Lately though, it seems to me, that all of these headlines and articles are exactly the same article. Making some claim about a major breakthrough and how this will make my computer 100 times faster and use 100 times less power....maybe...in the future.
It seems always to the case that in 10 years, "this" will enable us to use a lot less power and have much higher densities and so on and so on.
Basically, why the techs are interesting, the articles are absolute crap. Sensationalizing everything where there is nothing worth do so about. Why can they not just explain the so-called break though, it's probable applications and realistically how long, if at all, until commercialization?
Actually, the headline reads 'Advances in Phase-Change Material Memory...' if you want to expand the initialism. PCRAM is the more common abbreviation for phase change (random access) memory. It's a very interesting technology for persistent storage, for two reasons. The first is that, like DRAM, it's byte-addressable. The second is that read speeds are almost as fast as DRAM. This means that you can just map a bit of it into a process's address space, without any copying, to make the data available. It's a good contender for swap / hibernate space, because you can write pages that haven't been modified recently out to PCRAM, update the page tables to point there, and then turn off DRAM chips. Writing to PCRAM is quite a bit slower than writing to DRAM, but is probably fast enough when you're in power-saving mode, so you can turn off all of the DRAM, and only turn it on when the system load increases again.
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