Windows Has a Future In RAM: AgigaTech Samples DDR3+Flash DIMM

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Windows Has a Future In RAM: AgigaTech Samples DDR3+Flash DIMM

Posted by timothy on Saturday September 1, 2012 @03:24AM from the wake-up-call-to-ram dept.

An anonymous reader writes "AgigaTech appears to be the first company to produce a non-volatile SDRAM DIMM — an SDRAM memory module that retains its contents even without power supply. The modules combine DDR2/3 SDRAM with NAND Flash as well as a data transfer controller and an ultracapacitor-based power source to support a data transfer from the SDRAM to Flash and vice versa. If this memory makes it into production, this is something that I instantly will want and will stand in line for."

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Eh? by eugene2k · 2012-09-01 03:28 · Score: 5, Insightful

What's windows got to do with it?

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Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
1. Re:Eh? by optikos · 2012-09-01 03:42 · Score: 3
  
  You mean SRAM (static RAM DIPs) back before in was on-die within the processor. SDRAM is synchronous dynamic RAM DIMMs. SRAM and SDRAM are entirely different.
2. Re:Eh? by sco08y · 2012-09-01 04:06 · Score: 2
  
  Who needs Windows when Windows can be broken?
  Not broken, but feature enhanced to improve air flow.
3. Re:Eh? by Ironhandx · 2012-09-01 05:34 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  There was a false idea floating around back in the days of the SIMMS-> DIMMS transfer that SDRAM stood for Static Dynamic Ram and that it switched to DRAM as the abbreviation for DIMMS. This was actually propagated in marketing for awhile.
  I've also seen people claim that SIMM stood for Static Inline Memory Module, what was actually the case was that SIMMS were most often a form of PRAM which is just battery backed DRAM, which added to the confusion.
  Static Dynamic RAM was actually sort-of a term for awhile but Synchronous Dynamic Ram needed the abbreviation far more as it extremely quickly became the standard.
  Therefore you have a situation where often SRAM and SDRAM can mean the same thing to some people.
  My cousin who is a Computer Science grad who got his degree around that time actually learned from a Prof who also had incorrect information and argued with me for a long time on the matter until I managed to care enough to dig out the relevant technical documents and show him why he was wrong.
4. Re:Eh? by Spaseboy · 2012-09-01 05:37 · Score: 2
  
  You obviously haven't used 8 on an SSD system. It's like using a faster, better iPad.
  
  --
  "I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
  -Jennifer Saunders as Edina Monsoon
No, wait.... by eugene2k · 2012-09-01 03:31 · Score: 3, Informative

"The most obvious application is the vision of keeping, for example, Windows completely stored in a DIMM." - is that it? Is that one sentence the reason for the headline?

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Apple has "Mac vs PC", Microsoft has "Laptop Hunters", Linux has recession
1. Re:No, wait.... by hairyfeet · 2012-09-01 07:38 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Its trollbait, it won't benefit Windows any more than it would BSD, Linux, or OSX. I mean who even shuts down anymore, when you have hybrid sleep? The amount of power used is negligible and if the battery gets low Windows automatically switches to hibernate.
  It seems to me the ones that would gain the most from this wouldn't be Windows but iOS and Android as it'd be great for cell phones. Just have the main OS shut down to this new RAM and have a tiny OS that simply listens for calls and SMS and wakes the larger OS if you have incoming communications. Hell with something like that we might actually have smartphones whose batteries last like the old dumbphones did, wouldn't that be nice?
  
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  ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Zero watt 'suspend' instead of 'hibernate' by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-01 03:32 · Score: 2, Informative

Instant on and zero-watt suspend instead of having to hibernate. This would be faster even than booting from SSD. The summary is implying that windows (or other OS) would reside installed on RAM instead of to the hard-drive, so there would be no load time.
1. Re:Zero watt 'suspend' instead of 'hibernate' by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-01 03:43 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  The summary is implying that windows (or other OS)
  Then why not say something non-ambiguous like "keep entire operating system in memory"? This is Slashdot not NewbDot. They don't have to "imply" anything; just say it.
2. Re:Zero watt 'suspend' instead of 'hibernate' by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-01 04:22 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Err no, there would be a load time because it's exactly "hibernate to SSD". It's just that they control the RAM-to-SSD bandwidth so they might in theory make the load time faster than a software solution, but they give no number.
  You are assuming that there will be separate RAM and NAND chips on this module. If the flash memory is interleaved with the RAM cells in the IC's then the data will never have to hit the bus and never have to be serialized. If this is the case the NAND-cells only have to be connect to the RAM-cells in a way that they are "nudging" the cells in the correct direction during power on and the memory will be fully loaded before the motherboard even releases the reset-signal to the CPU.
Old News by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-01 03:32 · Score: 3, Informative

Viking has been doing this for awhile. This is their second incarnation.
http://www.vikingtechnology.com/arxcis-nv
UPS by digitalderbs · 2012-09-01 03:38 · Score: 2

I'm a little skeptical that this will revolutionize IT. How is this an improvement over a system on a UPS with a lot of RAM and aggressive caching? Data centers, which seem to be this product's first market target, already have this in place.
Less interesting than the writer thinks. by queazocotal · 2012-09-01 03:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

This will require essentially the same software infrastructure as normal suspend to RAM.
The system still has to go through the steps:
Check to see if any critical tasks are running - if so, pause suspend, and ask user.
Same with any communications tasks that may be interrupted.
Stop tasks.
Save state from all hardware to RAM.
Suspend to RAM.
Just capturing an image of the running system does not result in a system that will resume.
It's not a case of put one of these magical DIMMs in, and you're fine for power cuts.
Is it possibly interesting - sure.
But in real life, it may have very little advantage over a seperate flash device, for main memory.
Now, as a super-fast SSD - truly awesome.
Also - WTF - this should never be patentable.
This is not an invention worthy of patent.
It does nothing novel that is not implicit in the problem statement.
'I want a non-volatile RAM'.
1. Re:Less interesting than the writer thinks. by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-01 04:21 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Having to save was fine back in the days when it took 20 seconds to save to disk. These days, every change should be able to be saved and logged to a change log on a second by second basis. Saving should be banished and everything should be able to be rolled forward and back. People keep saying computers are more than fast enough, so put that extra power to actual useful things.
2. Re:Less interesting than the writer thinks. by wbav · 2012-09-01 04:29 · Score: 2
  
  Actually, I think you're over-estimating the task.
  
  Since most "critical" tasks such as writing to a disk or communicating over the network already require handling of drop outs (SATA is hot swappable, most communication is USB based which can cut out) it should be as simple as retrying those tasks when the power comes back on. In theory this should be able to handle power drop outs. You might have to alter the OS to have effectively a journal with respect to the CPU/other hardware, but that's not a terrible problem to solve.
  
  Just because current OSes can't handle this gracefully doesn't mean they won't in the near future.
  
  As to being able to patent this, if the solution is so obvious and straight forward, why hasn't this been done for years? The patents likely refer to solving various problems in integrating an ultracap with a DIMM.
  
  --
  
  =================
  Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
3. Re:Less interesting than the writer thinks. by pinkushun · 2012-09-01 05:05 · Score: 2
  
  TFA tells us the technology will not be targeted towards PC's, but for RAID controllers.
  I guess it could help against data loss in critical systems, combined with disk caching it can offer nice responsive write times.
4. Re:Less interesting than the writer thinks. by TheRealMindChild · 2012-09-01 05:30 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  You don't want this, the same as you really don't want a "never reboot" PC.
  
  Saving to disk is an explicit action of "This is at a state I want it to be in". If it is persistent, for instance, and my kids/cat/whatever edit it beyond repair, I don't want that existing instead of my work. You could argue about rolling back, based on your logging suggestion, but you just made a simple paradigm into an over-engineered tedium. Also, think about having to play back that log every time you opened it, multitudes of keystrokes and menu commands could be needed before it is ready.
  
  --
  
  "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
5. Re:Less interesting than the writer thinks. by TheRealMindChild · 2012-09-02 01:38 · Score: 2
  
  If you ever had to developed for a PDA, it is immediately obvious, but maybe not for everyone else. Once a program runs wild, eats all the memory, crashes a service, you need to reboot, but there is no such thing. Ultimately, you end up having to yank the battery if you want anything like a reboot
  
  --
  
  "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I don't see it by Zuriel · 2012-09-01 03:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

Okay, I've broken the Slashdot rule and read the article.
Can anyone tell me why this is so much better than traditional RAM with a SATA attached SSD? Or using hibernate to disk with an SSD? Is SATA so slow and laggy that there's a big benefit to attaching flash chips to our RAM slots?
Retaining data in RAM without power is cool as a technical feat, but my SSD doesn't take long to fill my RAM chips.
1. Re:I don't see it by sco08y · 2012-09-01 04:08 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Okay, I've broken the Slashdot rule and read the article.
  Can anyone tell me why ...
  No, because we didn't break the damned rule! Now, do you see why we have it?
New Memory Technologies - The Impact by RudyHartmann · 2012-09-01 03:42 · Score: 4, Interesting

Since computers began we have had hierarchal memory systems. Cache is the most expensive, but the fastest. DRAM is much cheaper slower and denser, but also volatile. Flash is faster than rotating media, slower than DRAM, but non-vloatile. It also has the drawback of limited programming cycles. Magnetic media is very dense, non-vloatile and slow. It is also mechanicly delicate. There are new technologies being developed that are both fast, dense, and non-volatile. With a fast enough, cheap and non-volatile memroy system, you would not need cache, RAM or disk. You could use on unified memory system. This is where I think many syustems are going. Windows, Linux, or OSX have nothing to do with it. Though they will all be greatly impacted.

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1. Re:New Memory Technologies - The Impact by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-01 04:44 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  At 4 GZ light can only propagate 7.49 cm in one clock cycle. Communication in a computer is slower than the speed of light so the cache has to be physically very close to the CPU and preferably on the same die. That means that a harddisk at the end of a cable is completely out of the question to replace cache even if the harddisk could satisfy IO requests in zero seconds - the time to get the signal to the harddisk and back through the cable would be a limiting factor. Now you could imagine the CPU and harddisk being built together as one unit, effectively using non-volatile on-die cache as a harddisk - that might work. If nothing else, it would give us another use for all those transistors that we are currently using on increasing the number of cores on a die - adding more cores will probably stop being useful for most tasks at some point. This won't be a cheap kind of storage any time soon, though.
2. Re:New Memory Technologies - The Impact by bratmobile · 2012-09-01 05:44 · Score: 2
  
  Uhhh, no. The cache hierarchy was added over time. The first few generations of computers did not have caches at all. Even the processors that powered a lot of early PC-era computers did not have caches, unless you count the registers. For example, 8086/8088 did not have cache, 6502 did not have cache, 6800 did not have cache, 68000 did not have cache, etc. Cache hierarchies were added later.
  The cache hierarchy also continually changes, albeit at a slow pace. Current generation CPUs typically have a 3-level cache, but the cache hierarchy in GPUs is quite different. Also, you have to take into account cache-coherent architectures (easy to program, inherently non-scalable) vs. non-coherent architectures (harder to program, far more scalable). It's not the case that you just always want more and more cache -- you want the right kind and size cache for the problem you are working on. For example, GPUs have a lot of local, read-only non-coherent caches, used for texture sampling and for constant buffers. These are very specialized caches, that don't look much like the general-purpose caches used in the L2 and L3 caches of CPUs. (The L1 I-cache and D-cache in a CPU is also very specialized, but differently specialized than a GPU cache.)
this is good! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-01 03:44 · Score: 4, Funny

now a reboot of windows won't solve anything!
Freescale MRAM by SpaceManFlip · 2012-09-01 04:15 · Score: 2

Motorola's spinoff co. Freescale already developed an arguably better concept based on magnetically-stored bits called MRAM. Unfortunately they never got it to scale freely enough to make actual DIMM modules with it. What they do have is lots of types of embedded memory chips for small applications, embedded systems and whatnot. Those are on the market now.
The MRAM concept would be awesome if they ever got it onto a PC or server motherboard, though. It requires zero power to retain its data, since the individual flipping bit states are stored by tiny magnets. That means you could turn your computer on/off just like a dumb appliance like an old TV set or radio, and you'd still be right where you left off (like S3 sleep state with no power supplied). Or you could cease worrying about battery backup systems, since it could lose power and come right back.
Nothing new under the sun ... by Alain+Williams · 2012-09-01 04:21 · Score: 5, Interesting

I remember some 40 years ago using a PDP-7. When I got tired at about 4am I would note the accumulator and program counter and switch the machine off. Coming back later I restored these and continued the program - it having remained in the core memory that the machine had.
Re:You know who has no future by YrWrstNtmr · 2012-09-01 05:34 · Score: 2

Your Worst Fucking Nightmare,
Clint

ahem...
Encrypt Thy Ram by ilikenwf · 2012-09-01 08:03 · Score: 2

Otherwise it'll be a big privacy hole - it'd be easy for jackbooted thugs to see what you were up to, just by pulling your DIMMs.