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Non-Volatile DIMMs To Ship This Year
Lucas123 writes "Both Viking and Micron plan to ship cards that combine DRAM and NAND flash on a standard DDR3 DIMM. The cards will have twice as much NAND flash as volatile memory. For example, the non-volatile DIMMs will come in capacities ranging from 4GB of DRAM to 16GB and 8GB of flash to 32GB of flash. Micron also sees its NVDIMM card being used as a storage tier, as cache for RAID systems, system check pointing, full system persistence, data logging, de-duplication and fast access to metadata. Without providing specifics, Viking said the NVDIMM cards will cost roughly a few hundred dollars each, more than a standard DDR3 DIMM module but still inexpensive enough for server and storage admins to consider for boosting application performance."
ummm... power consumption.....duh.
servers are not busy all the time....they idle but need to spin up fast on demand....
Proffits increase because you'll pay more and more often for a defective design. REMEMBER IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Authorities won't need to freeze RAM sticks anymore to extract encryption keys in memory when seizing servers?
It is bad enough that flash is worming its way into hard drives, but memory? True non-volatile memory like MRAM would be interesting, but I don't want unreliable and short-lived garbage like flash soldered together with other components. All this does is ensure that devices will be destined for the landfill that much earlier, but of course that is a "feature". There ought to be laws enacted to prohibit non-replaceable consumables, wether batteries, flash memory, or whatever else.
While on the subject of memory features, ECC should be first on the list.
I think your situation is more complicated than they plan.
If your RAM is non-volatile, why would you write it to flash memory, and then read it back in? You could just leave that data directly in RAM. Aren't you just describing a hibernation process? With non-volatile RAM, the hibernation process (write, powerdown, powerup, read) completely eliminates the write/read steps.
So you mention that the cost of writes is high compared to a low power maintenance state... That's true, but non-volatile RAM means that not only is the write unnecessary, but so is the low power maintenance state.
(I could of course, have completely misread your post, if so, I apologize. It just seemed like you were describing hibernation)
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj