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Forget Flash: Resistive RAM Crams 1TB Onto Tiny Chip
nk497 writes "Flash memory could soon be a thing of the past, according to U.S. startup Crossbar, which claims it's close to bringing resistive RAM (RRAM) to the market. Crossbar is touting impressive specs for the RRAM technology, promising 20 times the write performance at a fraction of the power consumption and size of the current best-in-class NAND flash modules — and squeezing terabytes of storage capacity onto a single chip the size of a postage stamp. The company also claims its technology can retain data for up to 20 years, compared with the standard one to three years with NAND flash."
why do i need this if there is the cloud to keep my data? why carry 1TB on my iphone when i can just pay at&t more money for more data to stream my music and netflix?
The first one we already do. SSDs are great.
The latter two, what would you replace them with? A trackpad could work I guess, but I can't see a replacement for a keyboard. Speaking is way slower than typing, typing on a touch screen is an error prone suckfest, and those are pretty much the only options right now.
Do the memory points wear out after a certain number of re-writes?
Technoli
I don't understand why you would even want to replace them. Mechanical switches are the best thing available in terms of providing input with tactile feedback. The only reason to use anything else is cost or space constraints.
Cool announcement.
But...
Given how often we hear researchers exclaiming they've invented the next "Greatest thing (TM)", I'll reserve judgement until I can purchase what comes out of their research.
I'd bet given the patent landscape at the moment that no matter what they have they will be sued for infringement by somebody. It's the way of things today.
Speaking is way slower than typing
Dictation can be quicker than typing in the right circumstances. My wife dictates reports all the time for her job precisely because it is quicker and she is a very good typist. Dictation is however a learned skill (like typing) that takes some practice to become proficient. You have to be able to form complete coherent sentences prior to speaking.
Looks like the CEO has 3 patents, one for portable storage, one for non-volatile memory, and one for a memory controller. http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50&Query=IN%2FMINASSIAN-GEORGE&d=PTXT So who knows, could be legit.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
You exaggerate. You must think in order to direct your fingers to type the keys that they do... this requires a type of deliberate intent that could, at least in theory, be picked up by devices designed to scan brain activity, and if the issues regarding understanding how the brain waves correspond to what, exactly, is being thought about can ever be worked out, such an apparatus could probably improve your throughput by more than an order of magnitude. The amount of time it takes for signals to reach your fingers from your brain alone is staggeringly slow compared to the speed of electronics.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I believe they mean unpowered and on the shelf. That would allow this new stuff to be used in place of backup tapes.
unpowered the flash cells will leak electrons off their floating gates (powered too if the device doesn't do some sort of maintenance cycle). with as few as 100 electrons making the difference on a cell...
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
More like
"Glass, check forecast for rainstorm"
'[OK, searching for cast of gay porn]'
How is that different than any other storage device failing?
This is why backups exist.
I am not suggesting you should. I am typing this on a keyboard likely older than many other posters. My company now has IT employees younger than this keyboard.
I can type faster than I can talk by a multitude, sometimes even faster than I can think
A quick look through YouTube's comments section reveals that you're not alone.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
But all the flash devices I've used have a retention period of at least 20 years (disclaimer: I'm thinking of flash ROMs and CPLDs and SPI flash for FPGAs, but the way they store bits is the same as a USB flash drive). I've never seen any as short as 1-3 years.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I have SD cards and USB thumb drives far older than 1-3 years and can still read the ancient data that was on them just fine.
Where did this "1-3 years for NAND flash" figure come from? It's a bit concerning.
a few notes:
- RRAM (aka ReRAM) is memsistor based RAM
- super simple design
- requires less power (lower voltage too) than FLASH and racetrack memory.
- 10ns switching (faster than DDR some DDR RAM)
- 1 trillion write operations according to US startup Crossbar
- possibly scaled down to 2nm (when they invent the manufacturing process)
so if this really works out, it may be a replacement for RAM and FLASH memory in lots of stuff. i'm not sure if this includes computers but at the very least, it could be used to retain data on RAM sticks (hopefully directly on them) when you turn off your PC.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
write-only memory has an infinite density.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
With (at least in the previous generation) the controller of SSD it is a lot worse.
With harddisks the are first soft faults, later there are hard faults, but often most data can be retrieved from a disk.
With SSD, from one second to the next the whole thing will not work anymore, you can't even read from it anymore, nothing.
how is it faster than typing on a proper keyboard? I cannot speak as quickly as I can type.
You probably can and do speak significantly quicker than you type unless you have some sort of speak impediment. Most people can comfortably speak at around 150 words per minute which is far faster than most can type. Dictating however does take some practice so you quite likely would be slower at first until you get comfortable dictating.
So not only will they sell new computers without a Windows install disc, they won't even install it on a disk drive, it will be preinstalled in RAM and all you have to do is turn it on.
Although it is kind of an interesting idea to consider a computer where there is no distinction between mass storage and RAM, where RAM is rewritable but permanent.
You could even leave programs in a running state but just stop executing them on the CPU. You could install new software in an already-running and configured state (how's that for a backup?).
Yes, and yes. I have no idea if it half a decade, or two decades, but that's the timeframe.
HDs also lose their data, but that takes a lot longer.
Rethinking email
I have some trouble believing this. Does she sound like the micromachines guy?
Listen to physicians dictate some time, particularly pathologists or radiologists who tend to do a lot of it. Yes, they often do speak very quickly - 200+ words per minute is not rare. Once they get good at it, they can easily rattle off a report in far less time than they could possibly type it no matter how quickly they type. Transcriptionists normally have to slow the recording down while typing to get what is being said. It's very easy to talk faster than anyone can type. Takes some practice to do so in a useful manner though. Helps too if there is some consistency in what is being said - like if you have to produce a consistent type of report. Lawyers and doctors very often use dictation systems to good effect and they do it 100% because it saves time, even for good typists.
The issue I have with believing this is not the forming complete sentences before speaking, but the simple fact that speech is slow and error prone.
Not once you are used to dictating. With a proper dictation system you can easily start, stop and record over what you've already done if you make an error. (People make a lot of errors typing too) Typically you get the report sent back to you for review and correction after transcription. However even including review it is still usually faster than typing it yourself.
Interesting this comes up. Over the weekend at Quakecon John Carmack addressed the evolution of controllers and his thoughts on the subject in his keynote. My favorite was when he was mocking Apple having the one button mouse and then one upped that by saying the kinect was "like a 0-button mouse."
My main argument would probably be, when you have a physical key/button with tactile feedback you can much more easily ensure an intentional action on the part of the user. Whereas touchscreens you are much more prone to fat fingering the wrong key (although this happens sometimes on keyboards too to be fair, just not nearly as often in my experience). A promising tech I remember reading about I think on slashdot was the touchscreen that could bend in such a way as to give tactile feedback at any point of the screen for a variety of sizes and shapes. Arguments could still be made to have solid keys/buttons still, but brings the two a little closer together at least.
"20 times the write performance"
I wish we could actually use that performance instead of being hamstrung by the limits of SATA 6gb. Even with today's flash memory we have hit the limits of SATA 6gb (around 600MB/sec). Can we please get cheap bootable PCIe x4/x8 cards instead of SATA. And stop making PCIe cards that are nothing more than SATA RAID + SATA SSD's. Design an ASIC that looks like an ATA or SCSI controller and directly talks to the memory and PCIe bus. If a 1 terabyte PCI card which has at least 2GB sec read speed for around $300 came out I would buy it immediately on impulse. I want to jump into a game and not even realize its loading. I want my programs to simply pop up. I want to forget that there is a difference between main memory and storage speeds.
At that point I won't have to worry about space limits on my SSD and eliminate the need for mechanical storage for non critical stuff like multimedia, backups, archives etc. That is how I do it today, one 256GB SSD for just my games, 1TB for boot/programs/VM's etc. I also use a 2TB eSATA drive for extra stuff when I ran out of room on my 1TB (too many experimental VM's). A high capacity SSD would allow me to stop juggling which games I have installed on my SSD. I mainly use steam so its not that big a deal but sucks when you want to dust off a game and wait for it to download.
Maybe in the future AMD or intel can provide Hypertransport or QPI connections to SSD's or like in that article a few months back, put the non-volatile memory on the main memory controller along with RAM. Then we can finally shed the need for mechanical disks.
They have been getting some sort of a comeback recently, with Das Keyboard becoming mainstream and a lot of companies following them to grab a piece of the market. I wouldn't trade my Das Keyboard for a "normal" keyboard, although it would be interesting to try one of the newer, "silent" versions. Supposedly they have an almost identical tactile feel to them, at least when comparing the graphs.
c++;
Yes, that is true. That's why I still save my long-term archived stuff on optical media.
Wait until you start using brain scanners and continue to "type" after you've fallen asleep. I cringe to think of how the conversation changes.
A Peltier device cools one end and heats the other. You need to dissipate the heat on the other end. If you don't, then the power required to maintain the temperature gradient increases and eventually the heat leaks back. Their main advantage is that they provide a good way of shifting the heat from the small CPU to a big heatsink. They don't magically make heat go away, they just move it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
On a side note, a few years back, I was working on designing a tape robot that would be able to use bare 2.5" drives.
It had almost zero time to load (once it was plugged into a reader slot and spun up.)
It also had various uses it could work as, be it a VTL, the disks presented as tape libraries, spanning disks where data that wasn't used would be moved to platters, then demounted.
The problem was the robotics. Only one company was able to make the robots that could reliably grip, move, and ungrip the drives, and they were asking $10,000 per unit for starters.
Eventually, the project got shuttled aside, but having a silo that was able to use disks without any special enclosure required would have been nice for the enterprise (IMHO, of course.)
The sad thing is that touch screens are actually a really good idea, and should have made it into general computing years ago. Unfortunatly, the way the get implemented is to try and replace a mouse, or worse yet a keyboard. Trying to replace a mouse with a touch screen makes about as much sense as trying to replace a keyboard with a mouse. Touch screens are a third input device. Not a replacement for the current two.
Really? Then do this: Click the left button and hold it down. Now click the right button and hold it down. Release the left button. Then release the right button.
I have one of these, it came with my iMac. I have a MacBook Pro. I bought the magic touch pad for the iMac. I have some fucking idea what I'm talking about.