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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."

9 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 Megol · · 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.

    2. Re: I love ARM by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

    3. Re:I love ARM by itsdapead · · 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.
    4. Re:I love ARM by fast+turtle · · 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
    5. Re:I love ARM by 0123456 · · 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.

    6. Re:I love ARM by AmiMoJo · · 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
  2. Novel chip memory by rossdee · · Score: 3, Funny

    Soon to be seen in Kindles and Nooks

  3. 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...