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ARM Researching Novel Chip Memory

Posted by Soulskill on from the bringing-in-the-heavy-hitters dept.

An anonymous reader writes "ARM may be best known as processor designer but the company is now working on a non-volatile memory that could scale down to 5nm, according to an Electronics 360 report. The memory is something different called Correlated-electron RAM that was originally developed by a professor at University of Colorado. ARM is joining a research collaboration to try and make the memory an option at ARM-friendly foundries."

8 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. I love ARM by EmperorOfCanada · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I love that ARM didn't initially go head to head with Intel and thus ended up not getting crushed by them (think transmeta/AMD). I thus have hopes that this not only works because it is cool but because ARM is cool and deserves another win for what they have done.

    1. Re:I love ARM by sumdumass · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Interesting take on it. ARM was originally loved because it effectively ran circles around x86 style processors at a fraction of the power. It's been a while and I'm not sure if this is still the case but I often root for old time favorites of long ago just out of habit.

      Judging from the prevalence of ARM technology in today's hardware, I would think it is still better then the Intel and AMD alternatives.

    2. Re:I love ARM by The123king · · Score: 1, Interesting

      It's still too little too late. Look at Apple when they moved to PowerPC. Apple's computers could run circles around the competing x86 chips, but by then the x86 architecture had become so prevalent there was no hope in hell that PowerPC would dominate. It's the same with between x86 and ARM in the mobile world. Sure, there will be x86 chips that are faster and more power efficient, but everyone's so ingrained into ARM that they'll never really make inroads into the market.

      --
      If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
  2. SRAM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    efficient SRAM would be a bigger deal. DRAM is holding us back right now.

  3. bahahahh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    gotta love you ARM fanboys, as misguided as you are.

    ARM's days are numbered. It can try to come up with whatever hacks it wants, but in the end, they can't beat physics. And if anyone understands that, it's Intel. MIPS won't change that. So prepare to watch ARM flail around while it loses significant market share to Intel over the next year.

    As for Nvidia... they love to overhype and underdeliver in hopes people will just settle for what they're offered. Nvidia will partake in the same woes as ARM over the next year, too.

    The only winner in this game is Intel. They have the know-how, fabs, and process perfected. They also have the gameplan mapped out. They're no idiots.

         

    1. Re:bahahahh by crutchy · · Score: 2, Interesting

      yeah and linux is just a fad!

      microsoft ftw! :-)

      The only winner in this game is Intel.

      might want to google "china"

    2. Re:bahahahh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Wow, I had a good laugh at your misguided fanboism.

      Even if ARM stopped making any chip technology to be used in computers, tablets and smartphones they would still be the leader in the chips in all those other devices you rely on in your daily life.

      Pull your head out and you'll see that ARM is everywhere. Are they the best? Not always, but they are often the best for what they are used for.

  4. Re:Might be a waste for bulk CMOS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Except that 16/14nm isn't much more logic dense than 22/20nm. Now we keep making the minimum feature size smaller, but the gate length is about the same size (e.g, FinFet). Of course types of circuits scale better than others (e.g. rams), but one of the reasons to not scale down is that power wall (it's currently better to have larger devices to minimize static current leakage than have minimum sized devices and melt the silicon as soon as you turn it on).

    At 10nm, quantum tunnelling is a significant impediment to low power operation and there is no established way to bring it to market-level yield (immersion lithography and multi-patterning yield isn't really panning out as well as people have hoped for random logic). We will probably no-doubt see memory devices at 10nm in a year or two, but random logic doesn't seem to be in the cards for a couple years at best, and the original poster may be correct, it may never reach economic sense to use it (if they can't get the leakage under control and it gives about the same random logic density when you use low leakage, larger logic gates) vs a previous more mature 14nm node.

    Intel likes it because their CPU chips are mostly L2/L3 cache rams so they are willing to pay the cost penalty of using a new node, but it may not make sense for others to follow. Even Intel is hedging their bets with larger wafer sizes in their next generation fab to get more production efficiency through the flow rather than totally betting a smaller die size from a smaller geometry process...