ARM Researching Novel Chip Memory

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

ARM Researching Novel Chip Memory

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 1, 2014 @10:17PM 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."

23 of 88 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

I love ARM by EmperorOfCanada · 2014-02-01 22:22 · 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 Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-01 23:12 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Same anon: I'm an idiot, please disregard that post.
2. Re:I love ARM by Megol · 2014-02-01 23:13 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  ARM started as Acorn in 1978, the same time that Intel created the 8086 processor. The current popular ARM processors are actually MIPS processors which likewise goes back to the early 1980s. So this stuff is oooooold.
  MIPS?!? Did you just make that up? Do you think x86 are MIPS too?!?
  ARM and MIPS are processors and there the similarities end.
3. Re: I love ARM by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-01 23:31 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  The Intel equivalents are roughly equal in terms of performance but are relatively expensive to buy for manufacturers. The base of Android would have to be recompiled for x86 (relatively easy) but there are some Android games/apps that are made Arm specific for performance gains and wouldn't run without development on other platforms.
  Its just a more costly less compatible alternative, if Intel want to make any gains they would need to demonstrate real performance benefits than just performance parity. I did hear they intended to start producing Arm based chips to get a foothold which would be a smart start but unlikely given pride.
4. Re:I love ARM by myurr · 2014-02-02 00:09 · Score: 2
  
  It was the first processor I learned to write assembly for, back on the Acorn Archimedes. Brilliant computers, so far ahead of their time, and I wouldn't be half the programmer I am now were it not for learning on those machines.
5. Re:I love ARM by itsdapead · 2014-02-02 00:57 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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).
  
  Actually, they did start out (as Acorn) by going head-to-head with Intel. Others have mentioned Acorn but not really pointed out that the original 1987 ARM was a credible competitor to the 80286 and 68000. (By "credible competitor" I mean "left the 68k and 286 choking on its dust"). It was only ever really used in that way in the Acorn Archemedes and RiscPC which never made it big outside of the UK - although it outlived most of the other non-Wintel personal computers.
  OK - when ARM was spun off they did, as you say, rather sensibly, end up going after the embedded market, but ARM might never have happened if Acorn had gone with the 80286 for their BBC Micro successor.
  
  --
  In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
6. Re:I love ARM by Bengie · 2014-02-02 01:26 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Intel's new 250mw CPUs have more mips and flops than ARM with the same power rating, and the Intel CPU has better idle power draw. Intel is starting to beat ARM at their own game and with full x86 CPUs. ARM is trying to break into Intel territory and looks to have "decent" power draw and performance, but many of their current CPUs do not scale well past 1ghz. Like their ARM A9 consumes 4x the power just to gain an extra 10% performance on the high end. These "low power" CPUs are great at low frequencies, but are horrible at higher frequencies. People assumed they'd scale mostly linearly and compete with Intel by just clocking up.
  
  ARM is still doing a lot of research and there is no reason they won't be able to compete with Intel on the desktop, but they're not there quite yet. They're just breaking into the server market, this will be interesting.
7. Re:I love ARM by nojayuk · 2014-02-02 02:12 · Score: 2
  
  ARM is a design operation, it produces no silicon of its own. Intel is an end-to-end company both designing and fabricating its own product with world-leading fabs, die shrinks, finFETs etc. Intel hasn't bothered much with low-power performance up till now as there wasn't a demand for it until relatively recently -- performance was for the data centre, supercomputers and workstations, low power consumption was for embedded devices and braindead phones and handhelds. Laptops were in the middle but a three-hour battery life was deemed acceptable if a powerful CPU was required.
  The markets have changed and Intel is putting serious effort and expertise behind a push to lower-power versions of its stock-in-trade x86 platform while ARM is moving into unknown territory trying to wring performance out of its core designs which were always optimised for low power operation first and foremost. At the moment it seems Intel is winning.
8. Re:I love ARM by fast+turtle · 2014-02-02 02:45 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Most ARM fans keep repeating the same fucking mantra - It uses less power then x86. Bullshit. It's not just the CPU that results in power demand for mobile systems (Tablets, phones and what not) it's the GPU, Screen, disk and all the other parts that go into the thing and Intel has finally paid enough attention to overall power budget that they're actually beating most of the ARM based SoC's out there in both power savings and performance.
  Look at the power demand of the Nvidia Tegra SoC's. Tegra3 was decent but limited GPU performance. Tegra 4 though blows through a batter like Richard Pryor did with hookers and Coke.
  Even Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC doesn't do any better as the GPU blows the power budget. Intel's Atom CPU's are competitive with ARM in performance and power budget. What screwed them was the fucking north bridge and GPU. That actually used more power then the CPU did yet they've fixed that with the latest Atom's due to a new SoC design focused on Power savings and yes I've used an early Atom Netbook - painful even with XP on it. The new ones are pretty decent now.
  
  --
  Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
9. Re:I love ARM by 0123456 · 2014-02-02 07:09 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  I've heard this before, but Intel likes to play games with power numbers. AMD's TDP is the limit of the processor if EVERYTHING were on. Intel's is under normal usage.
  Yeah, right.
  That's why, when you actually measure the power consumption, you usually find Intel CPUs are far more efficient than AMD's.
10. Re:I love ARM by viperidaenz · 2014-02-02 07:57 · Score: 2
  
  Intel held on to the ARM licenses they had when building the StrongARM and XScale CPU's a decade ago.
11. Re:I love ARM by AmiMoJo · 2014-02-02 10:19 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  The problem is that no matter how good Intel chips are only Intel makes them. ARM is widely licensed and a manufacturer has a vast selection of processors and most important system-on-chip silicone to choose from, at all performance and price levels. There is also the language issue, with far eastern manufacturers preferring support and documentation in their native languages and from local companies.
  More over you generalize too much. Saying "ARM A9 consumes 4x the power" is meaningless because there is no "ARM A9" chip, only various implementations of the A9 spec and they are all different.
  
  --
  const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
  SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
SRAM by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-01 22:36 · Score: 2, Interesting

efficient SRAM would be a bigger deal. DRAM is holding us back right now.
Novel chip memory by rossdee · 2014-02-01 23:16 · Score: 3, Funny

Soon to be seen in Kindles and Nooks
Re:bahahahh by crutchy · 2014-02-02 01:09 · 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"
Re:5nm? Die Shrink? by Bengie · 2014-02-02 02:44 · Score: 2

Probably near the distance where quantum tunneling becomes an issue. When your design requires a layer of insulation and electrons can pass through it, then your design breaks.
Re:bahahahh by dreamchaser · 2014-02-02 03:21 · Score: 2

That's like saying Windows is the best for what it is used for because it has a large market share. ARM is prevalent in mobile devices because when smartphones and tablets started to rise in popularity Intel at the time had no low power option to use as their answer to ARM. I'm not so sure ARMs 'days are numbered,' I'm just pointing out that numbers does not necessarily mean ARM is the best at what they are used for anymore. Intel has closed a great deal of ground in that regard.
Re:bahahahh by Pinky's+Brain · 2014-02-02 06:32 · Score: 2

Intel has good technology ... but everyone is going to be a loser in the coming years and Intel is becoming a tempting target for a leveraged buyout, which might well destroy them as an IDM.
Might be a waste for bulk CMOS by PeterGasperini · 2014-02-02 07:27 · Score: 2

The fact that ARM is doing such theoretical research and trying to turn it into practical applications is excellent. However, they might want to consider investigating the use of this memory in non-CMOS applications, particularly for sensors. Nobody is going to make a 5nm bulk CMOS node - we've hit the Last Node at 14nm.
1. Re:Might be a waste for bulk CMOS by Anonymous Coward · 2014-02-02 11:04 · 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...
Re:The exact goals, duration and budget... by viperidaenz · 2014-02-02 08:02 · Score: 2

Farnsworth invented the smell-o-scope!
Re:bahahahh by viperidaenz · 2014-02-02 08:07 · Score: 2

MIPS and ARM are different architectures.
Re:The exact goals, duration and budget... by RaceProUK · 2014-02-02 15:03 · Score: 2

And in a later episode, he actually had one.

--
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun