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HP To Introduce Flash Memory Replacement In 2013
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?"
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.)
Reboots usually don't happen because of hardware, and certainly not because of the type of RAM you're running. It's bad software.
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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.