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HP To Introduce Flash Memory Replacement In 2013

Posted by samzenpus on from the move-it-on-over dept.

Spy Hunter writes "Memristors are the basis of a new memory technology being developed by HP and Hynix. At the International Electronics Forum, Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs, said, 'We're planning to put a replacement chip on the market to go up against flash within a year and a half. We're running hundreds of wafers through the fab, and we're way ahead of where we thought we would be at this moment in time.' They're not stopping at a flash replacement either, with Williams saying, 'In 2014 possibly, or certainly by 2015, we will have a competitor for DRAM and then we'll replace SRAM.' With a non-volatile replacement for DRAM and SRAM, will we soon see the end of the reboot entirely?"

11 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Ofcourse not by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Ofcourse we will not see the end of the reboot entirely. I have yet to encounter a Windows or Linux system that you can upgrade without rebooting. (In practice that is, in theory it should all work.)
    Memristors will make a dent in the small scale UPS market since there will be no need to shut down gracefully but we will still need large scale backup system where you want to continue running your operation during power outage.
    The real change we will see is when memristors replace flash and dram since there will no longer make sense to keep the bulk storage in a different memory from the rest of the system. Everything will be memory mapped always like it was in the good old ROM-based days.
    The problem is that both Windows and Linux is badly prepared for this since both of them uses executable program structures that require modification upon loading. A lot of programs are also using datafiles in an abstract format that require extensive parsing before usage. (Like XML or other text based configuration files.)
    This makes it hard to transition into XIP-system where loading is something that doesn't happen. (Did anyone with a battery backed SRAM PCMCIA-card try eXecute In Place on the Amiga? I would like to know if it actually worked or if it was just a term mentioned in the manuals. It should have worked since it's not really any different from compiling programs for memory-resident operation.)

  2. End of the reboot? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Reboots usually don't happen because of hardware, and certainly not because of the type of RAM you're running. It's bad software.

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
    1. Re:End of the reboot? by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I assume, then, that you never shut your computer down for the night. Or for the weekend.

      I turn my computer on for the night and the weekend*.

      * you insensitive clod!

      --
      My first program:

      Hell Segmentation fault

    2. Re:End of the reboot? by trold · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You've missed an important point here. Non-volatile RAM means than powering off does not imply a reboot. When power returns the next morning, or after the weekend, the computer is still in the same state as when you pulled the plug Friday evening. /trold

    3. Re:End of the reboot? by wjousts · · Score: 4, Funny

      My computer turns me on for nights and weekends!

  3. end of the HDD by gbjbaanb · · Score: 3, Insightful

    it won't mean the end of the reboot, stupid editor. This is sSlashdot, don't you know you have a Microsoft-Windows-BSOD-Daily-reboot meme to maintain?? :)

    What I think it could mean the end of is the HDD, or rather the distinction between memory and storage. If all your apps and long-term-storage data could be placed into RAM, then you'd do it wouldn't you. (this assume a few things, like reliability and long-term unpowered persistence) but imagine having 500Gb of RAM that just happened to hold all your data, rather than keeping it separate and shuffling it between the two. That could be quite a change for the way we see computers compared to the ways we've been using them for the last 40 odd years.

    1. Re:end of the HDD by pz · · Score: 4, Informative

      What is old is new again.

      There was a project at MIT LCS/AI back in the mid-80s to explore what it would mean to have massive amounts of RAM. A machine was designed with 1 GB of main memory. By today's standards, that's pathetic, but recall that this is in the era where PCs had 640 KB, max, and 1 GB was not only larger than every hard disk (desktop ones were at 10 MB, and even the big enterprise drives were only on order of 10 times bigger), but --- and this was the really important part -- would fill out the virtual address space, so there would be no need for a VM system. Hal Abelson and Gerry Sussman were behind these big ideas (the same duo who wrote Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs). I don't recall if the machine was actually built (maybe it was the Digital Orrery?), but I do recall one of the contrary viewpoints being that VM was considered important not just for simulating a larger memory system, but that for type-driven hardware like Lisp Machines, a huge address space was useful because the upper addressing bits could be used to encode type, even if that address space was too large to ever be populated.

      --

      Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
    2. Re:end of the HDD by maxwell+demon · · Score: 3, Informative

      IMHO the main advantage of a VM system is that a program doesn't need to care where its memory is located. It can always act as if it just owned all the memory up to some maximum address. The VM takes care of mapping that to the right place.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    3. Re:end of the HDD by swb · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Even if you decided to maintain a VM system, the idea of a unified storage system (DRAM+DISK as one device) is pretty fascinating.

      You could theoretically install a program in an already running state. All your programs could be running simultaneously -- "quitting" an application may just be telling the kernel to stop scheduling it; launching it again would mean just scheduling it again to execute, where it would pick up exactly where it left off.

      Obviously a lot of software would have to be rewritten to take advantage of this, but some of the possibilities are fascinating.

  4. Memristor implication for OS, Software, Energy... by An+dochasac · · Score: 3, Interesting

    We can finally dump the multiple layers of caching, look-ahead and other OS complexity designed to hide several orders of magnitude difference between register/DRAM access and persistent storage (tape/Hard drive/core memory...). Operating systems can return to the level of simplicity they had back when everything was uniformity slow. But now everything will be uniformly fast and we'll can focus complexity on multiprocessing.

    It will become practical to implement neural networks in hardware. This will completely change the way we design and program software and databases.

    Persistent and portable user sessions will become the norm. (Look at Sun Ray for an idea of how this works. Sun Ray sessions are typically logged in for months at a time. This means software has to be better behaved but it also means we won't have to rely on user memory to restore a desktop and applications to... now where was I?

  5. Re:Can we believe HP? by plover · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Given the HP board of directors' track record in making good decisions, one could speculate that they would invest in TTL chip technology for the same reason.

    Yes, hundreds of wafers ahead of schedule is good, but they haven't even sold one chip yet. It's hardly time to go all in and throw the car keys on the table, too.

    --
    John