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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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 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.
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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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
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 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.
  
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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.
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.
this is good! by Anonymous Coward · 2012-09-01 03:44 · Score: 4, Funny

now a reboot of windows won't solve anything!
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.