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Researchers Make RAM From a Phase Change We Don't Entirely Understand (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We seem to be on the cusp of a revolution in storage. Various technologies have been demonstrated that have speed approaching that of current RAM chips but can hold on to the memory when the power shuts off -- all without the long-term degradation that flash experiences. Some of these, like phase-change memory and Intel's Optane, have even made it to market. But, so far at least, issues with price and capacity have kept them from widespread adoption. But that hasn't discouraged researchers from continuing to look for the next greatest thing. In this week's edition, a joint NIST-Purdue University team has used a material that can form atomically thin sheets to make a new form of resistance-based memory. This material can be written in nanoseconds and hold on to that memory without power. The memory appears to work via a fundamentally different mechanism from previous resistance-RAM technologies, but there's a small hitch: we're not actually sure how it works. The two mechanisms used to change the resistance have been reported in the journal Nature Materials.
So they switched substrates from unobtanium to unexplanium?
can hold on to the memory when the power shuts off -- all without the long-term degradation that flash experiences....and has used a material that can form atomically thin sheets to make a new form of resistance-based memory. This material can be written in nanoseconds and hold on to that memory without power. THIS POWER USES COOL ENERGY.....A NEW FORM OF MATTER THAT IS JSUT THERE WHEN YOU NEED IT TO DO SHIT.
-Unresolved symbol? Byte me!
I find it humorous that someone who feels it necessary to inject idiotic political commentary into unrelated subjects (especially using the 6-year-old tactic of name calling) would have the nerve to say other peoples brains don't work.
Generally, we don't care about RAM holding its state beyond a power cycle, yet one of the focus' seems to be about holding the information long term. NVRAM perhaps? It also talks about flash degradation, but honestly, flash degradation hasn't been an issue in RAM modules, since, forever. In flash storage, the degradation hasn't been shown to be much of an issue with MLC let alone SLC drives. So what is this exactly? Enhanced RAM? Combined RAM/Storage? Of course the "it works but we don't know why!" is baity enough for the general population, but I guarantee they know enough about how it works to write a paper on it. Sheesh.
we're not actually sure how it works.
Call it ERAM aka Emo RAM because "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND ME AT ALL!" ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What's the worst thing that could possibly happen?
--something witty
We don't know how it works but it keeps winning.
This is true.
We use water in science every single day, but we still don't fully understand the physics behind water.
It is very different to most molecules. (especially in regards to temperature)
However, knowing how this eventually works could lead to massively increased densities, or power-saving in other areas of the computer. Imagine all registers and CPU memories were replaced with this. No more needing to fanny around with stupid stuff like hibernate or other hacks, hit a button, it simply halts after a cycle and turns off. Hit it again, power on and continues where it left off.
A secondary processor or facets of a processor for always-on functionality isn't a new concept, it is used regularly today from consoles to phones.
No more lengthy waits to hibernate. No more battery charge being destroyed by standby mode.
This would be game-changing to computing everywhere. Even more so if it can be scaled up cheaply.
It could eliminate all current RAM, SSDs and HDDs if it could be produced to market scales.
It could indirectly lead the way to a completely different layout for motherboards for a fucking change! Motherboards blow 10 kinds of ass with their strict layout. Standards schmandards.
The current de-facto standard needs to die off already, it is horribly restrictive.
Companies have been doing all kinds of hacks to try fit more in to motherboards without breaking enclosures and cases.
Stuff like vertical towers coming off the board for the sake of overclocking, or m2 / eSATA neatly nested between 2 smaller PCI slots, sometimes even 2 of them with a full slot between them and various others.
Some motherboards are coming up to 7 layers thick in the higher end ranges. It's getting ridiculous.
I could understand that in scenarios like the Raspberry Pi, but a full motherboard? The thing ends up a brick with that much stuck inside of it. Remember when motherboards were flimsy pieces of crap that you were scared of snapping if you pushed too hard? I'm more scared my motherboard kicks my ass if I push it too hard!
Too good to be true. Watch this, an asteroid will blow up the facility AND all the servers that hold all this research.
Just our luck! We can't catch a break man.
I'm glad Purdue is getting some dividends out of that nanotechnology center they built 10 years ago. That thing always gave me the creeps. Probably because I watched too much Star Trek as a kid.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Perhaps especially in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals, there are plenty of products that we see working, but nobody knows exactly how.
Wikipedia has an entire category for just that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Nerds store their data on punched paper tape, made of paper, which we don't entirely understand."
Go ahead and tell me everything you know about trees.
For example the brain works...
Would've been nice if you'd given an example.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Clearly you are proof it doesn't *always* work, but I believe I already covered the counter-examples.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Sounds like regular engineering to me!
"I made something awesome, no idea how it works, but it does - don't touch it! You'll break it!"
There are at least 12 form factors (AT, baby AT, ATX,Micro ATX BTX DTX LPX NLX Micro ATX, Mini-ITX, Nano-ITX, Pico-ITX) thatr I know of, plus numerous proprietary form factors in the SBC segment. The industry came up with those because it was useful to them to do so. Nobody forced them to and nothing stops anyone from coming up with their own form factor or proprietary extensions to existing standards. Those standards and the minimum level of interoperability are a big part of why digital technology saw such an explosion in my lifetime.
Let's look at this from both sides of the purchase: Would you want to buy a Dell tower if you knew that only Dell branded add-ons will work with it? Dell proprietary memory, Dell proprietary video card, Dell proprietary cases, Dell proprietary network cards, Dell proprietary storage and so on. We had just that situation back when I was first learning computers. With rare exceptions, hardware for a Burroughs computer had to come from Burroughs, Philips hardware had to come from Philips and so on. No single OEM aside from maybe IBM, could really achieve economies of scale, all the OEMs R&D was restricted by the need to not infringe on patented good ideas from other outfits. Shit was expensive, shit didn't work all that well, shit was difficult to adapt to user needs and it was hard to make shit talk to other shit reliably. Through sheer size, IBM managed to dominate the market and some of the early desktop standards were explicitly "IBM compatible"
On the manufacturer end, being able to use an existing hardware standard also means they are more likely to be able to use standard software implementations as well. That speeds development time and reduces R&D costs. Why re-invent the network stack, possibly introducing your own failure points, when there is already a very good, exhaustively examined and tested standard? If you make sounds cards (or these days, dedicated sound processors for inclusion in someone else's motherboard) do you really want to have to develop to meet 20 different hardware standards to match every mobo manufacturers proprietary designs, or would you prefer to just develop to the PCI standard and be able to make one device that works for almost everybody?
Finally, proprietary motherboard designs are still alive and well in the industrial/embedded segments and in laptops and other mobile devices. There the form factor is constrained by physical environment and case packaging concerns, not meeting form factor standards. What IS still being develop to standard in those markets is the interfaces. Most notebooks use the same sorts of ram, albeit with a different size and pin count, as desktop machines. They still do standard ethernet, bluetooth and so on. Also, as far as I know, Big Iron (mainframes and other very large scale computing solutions) is still largely proprietary.
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About new kind of DRAM, they are selling smoke.
You know that system that is behaving badly and just seems to work again the minute you reboot? That might not work if engineers get non-volatile RAM to work really well. Everything will be in memory with no need to load it off disk. But those slow memory leaks, weird data corruption bugs, or software that stops working when it gets into a certain state; will not just magically disappear when you reboot!
The last recorded words of the human civilization will be: "Wonder what happens if we push this button?"
We already avoided this fate once. Some of the smartest people in the world worked on creating the atom bomb but even they were a little concerned that the bomb might set off a runaway nuclear chain reaction in the atmosphere on detonation and kill everyone on the planet.
You're from the reality where Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't happen then? Or, you know, every nuclear bomb test in the history of humanity?
No one knew how vacuum tubes worked when they started playing with them. In fact, the first tubes pre-date the discovery of the electron; and thermionic emission is how tubes work. But once they figured it out....hoooo boy here comes your electronic revolution.
Every day we use things that work despite the fact that we, as individuals don't know how or why they work.
What's really scary is the number of medicines which fall into this category.
Heck, we don't even completely understand how aspirin works.
#DeleteChrome
The last recorded words of the human civilization will be: "Wonder what happens if we push this button?"
My money's on "hold my beer!"
#DeleteChrome
Every day we use things that work despite the fact that we, as individuals don't know how or why they work.
Every day we rely on gravity and yet nobody knows how that works. We live in a universe that we do not fully understand and possibly never will. Understanding something often helps us to find a way to exploit it to do something useful but, as you said, it is not required.
Sometimes the blind refuse to see the obvious no matter how simple you make it.
I just Google'd Roger Shawyer Em Drive and it has a flaw in it, his waves needs to be at a fractional harmonic of 1F to work, and he'd be better using an electric wave, rather than the magnetic one (at right angles).
Light travels at C without propellant, *clearly*. It's a wave so its riding some oscillating field. So in principle he can make his thing ride that oscillating field too. But if he doesn't want to put in energy all the time, it has to be a harmonic of 1F (even fractional harmonic will do).
You already proved the oscillating field, it was already observed:
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13041516&cid=57791044
The following thought experiment helps you understand that light and matter are one and the same.
1. Light has an oscillating electric field (by observation)
2. So light must have charges oscillating (because other electric fields derive from charged particles)
3. Light comes from matter (e.g. turn on a torch)
4. So matter contains the charges that form light's oscillating charges
5. Matter can COMPLETELY be converted to light (e.g. particle+anti-particle to photon)
6. So matter must be ONLY made of these two particles with no residue.
7. And the only forces derive from electric if we only have charged particles.
There is no mass, the difference between matter and light is not mass:
1. Light's has no mass
2. If matter is completely made of the same stuff light is made of, it has no mass either.
This is how momentum actually works (explained in super simple terms):
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13054198&cid=57802324
I see NASA already measured thrust, which is what I'd expect. The thrust should depend on wavelength, and it should increase and decrease and increase and decrease as you go through the spectrum.
WHICH MEANS THEY CAN GET ME AN ACCURATE VALUE FOR F!
If you can measure the frequencies of the peaks, and I have enough of them, I (or you) can calculate the value for F because the peaks will be at a fractional harmonics.
"They conducted further experiments in vacuum, a set of 18 observations with 40-80W of input power. They published the results in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics's peer-reviewed Journal of Propulsion and Power, under the title "Measurement of Impulsive Thrust from a Closed Radio-Frequency Cavity in Vacuum". This was released online in November 2016, with print publication in December.[24][91][92][93] The study said that the system was "consistently performing with a thrust-to-power ratio of 1.2±0.1mN/kW", and enumerated many potential sources of error.[24]"
Honestly when you understand the resonance field it's a real duh!
Think about it for a second, how do radio waves move? There's no 'mass' so no momentum, so how come they move? And how does light move? How does it slow down through glass as if its interacting with matter?
It is super trivial to understand:
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13054198&cid=57802324
So of course the EM drive works, he just didn't fully understand why it works.
The problem with gravity is, it's been built up into a mystical container for all the magic that's needed to fix the existing physics model. It can never be defined or understood, because it can never contain all that magic.
"magic gravity" (the physics model) both bends space affecting light (to explain gravitational lensing) and stretches space *not* affecting light (to explain why the universe is accelerating outwards, with matter out-running light to explain the edge of the observable universe). It also somehow explains why the speed of light always appears to be C when measured.
Sorry but its really dull:
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13054198&cid=57802324
Something akin to the clumping effect in water.
Imagine a resonant field, everything is oscillating on that field, light is travelling one wavelength over that field per oscillation of matter. So whenever you measure it, the matter of the equipment you measure it with sets its velocity. Hence C.
It is not gravity bending space. Such a thing is impossible, a simply thought experiment explains why:
https://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13041516&cid=57791032
And space is not expanding, the edge of the visible universe is the event horizon of the black hole we're in. (We're oscillating at 2F relative to the outer 1F universe).
It's not particularly complicated to understand.
We have memories that we don't know how they work, perhaps they will be a good fit for quantum computing where we only probably know what they are going to do.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Sadly, you're probably correct insomuch as anyone on /. who cares about such things already knows this stuff is going on. So those who don't care will skip it and those who do care *may* skip it, or at best skim it because I'm preaching to the choir...
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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' Isaac Asimov
Yes, thanks for the links. Interesting reading. Getting back to the future with "shared nothing" architecture, we had that at Tandem in 1976...
Yeah future large memory will be continuously erroring, single bits at least. Need something beyond SECDED...
Perhaps especially in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals, there are plenty of products that we see working, but nobody knows exactly how.
Wikipedia has an entire category for just that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In fact, I used to joke that the Physician's Desk Reference (standard Reference book for Pharmaceuticals) could be printed on two sides of a piece of letter-sized paper if they just reduced the phrase "The exact mechanism of this compound is not completely understood." to a single symbol...
Every day we use things that work despite the fact that we, as individuals don't know how or why they work.
What's really scary is the number of medicines which fall into this category.
Heck, we don't even completely understand how aspirin works.
See my post on this point:
https://science.slashdot.org/c...
I'm going for "Why are you still talking? Everyone's telepathic now!
But those slow memory leaks, weird data corruption bugs, or software that stops working when it gets into a certain state; will not just magically disappear when you reboot!
Obviously the boot monitor will clear RAM and retry on a boo failure. What you apparently don't know is that existing DRAM is in an indeterminate state when powered up, and it has to be cleared before use anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Proprietary-format motherboards do still exist, but they are vanishingly rare compared to how they used to be. Back in the early days of the PC you were super lucky if you could swap motherboards between brands. But then the clones came along and they all used the pattern from either the IBM PC and XT, or the IBM AT, and that began a sea change in the PC industry. It wasn't until ATX, however, that those proprietary motherboards became rare.
Today, it's actually typical for SFF PCs to use a standard-size motherboard, albeit one of the smaller standards. Only the most expensive and fiddly SFF PCs (and NUCs, of course) use a custom mainboard.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sorry, I'm not familiar with those issues. I'm not a Windows user. I suggest you try running an OS that values uptime.
Or stable operating systems with years of uptime. You expert.
Go back to your Windows. I bet there's another rebood needed in order to be able to reboot!
But you said *advanced*. Tha means no conquering and enslaving.
Some of us read it in full. Thank you for taking the time to compose a well-thought-out post.
Professional operating systems offer live snapshotting and uptimes of years or decades.
Even Windows can do some of this, nowadays
What you apparently don't know is that existing DRAM is in an indeterminate state when powered up, and it has to be cleared before use anyway.
Kind of. RAM stays wherever it is at the time; the OS will wipe each allocated page on allocation.
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The last recorded words of the human civilization will be: "Wonder what happens if we push this button?" ....
We already avoided this fate once.
Once?
9 times the world was at the brink of nuclear war — and pulled back
https://www.businessinsider.co...
Can't be. All modern systems require NOSMOKE.EXE compatible memory.
Two votes, nice post.
The atom bomb project is just the most well publicized flirtation with Armageddon. And while they didn't ignite the atmosphere with the first test we now have the means to pretty much destroy the entire planet several times over with a few button pushes. The biggest threat to the global population is bioweapons. We are one laboratory breach away from battling the walking dead. And with every major power on the planet now creating bioweapons for the express purpose of creating countermeasures all it would take is one mistake or one crazy person to depopulate the planet.
Thank you for doing so and for letting me know. But I'll bet you one free Internet that most of the issues I raised were things you were already aware of.
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damn, my inline quote stuff got lost in the posting. I must have done something wrong. The "motherboards blow..." bit is a quote from the parent post.
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They naysayers said that about the LHC causing a black hole and destroying the world. There is always going to be someone who thinks the worst.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
This article was talking about a process that works but those studying the process did not know WHY it worked. When the first atom bomb was detonated the people who built it knew how the bomb was supposed to work in theory but there was still some doubt about other possible outcomes.
"9 times the world was at the brink of nuclear war" It is probably been more than 9 times but there are no unknowns or doubts about the damage a nuclear bomb would produce.
The scariest scenario we face today comes from bioweapons. It takes far less resources to create a bioweapon when compared to building a nuclear weapon. And countries around the world are creating bioweapons in order to create countermeasures. We are one laboratory screwup or one demented scientist away from having to battle the walking dead.