Memristor-based non-volatile memory matches DRAM performance

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16725529

by azernik • 14 years ago

70 45 14 years ago

bbc.co.uk

sschueller• 14 years ago

Very interesting video on the memristor. Long but worth it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

sceadu• 14 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFdDPzcZwbs

vsviridov• 14 years ago

No more RAM chip freezing to extract the encryption keys for Mr. Government Man...

simias3• 14 years ago

This is actually a valid point, most modern encryption schemes rely on the fact that the RAM can't be dumped easily.

I guess you could keep at least some volatile memory for storing sensitive information such as encryption keys. Of course unless the rest of the MRAM is encrypted you may indeed leak potentially sensitive data.

Maybe dedicated hardware could encrypt/decrypt the RAM contents on the fly when the CPU or the devices access it, but it sounds costly.

wazoox2• 14 years ago

Processor cache could easily hold the encryption keys. Now that memory controllers are integrated to modern CPUs, this could be achieved quite easily when revamping the architecture, adding a couple of special instructions.

bwarp6• 14 years ago

This is the next wave of technology. It solves so many fundamental problems. I can't wait to have a few GiB of MRAM in a workstation.

Load/store architectures may go away due to this. Imagine 32Gb of CPU registers.

justincormack• 14 years ago

It only said it wad RAM speed, not register or cache speed. There are speed of light constraints in the memory hierarchy too surely?

bwarp6• 14 years ago

A memristor is a smaller and simpler component than once register cell. Due to this, leakage and speed of light are less of an issue than the current techology. I wouldn't expect replacement for a decade though.

haberman4• 14 years ago

Yes, it said it was as fast as DRAM, not SRAM (the latter is what is used for cache and registers).

jdrols• 14 years ago

Agreed on all points. This is a total gamechanger in terms of hardware and software architecture. Even if it follows the relatively-slow uptake of SSD's it completely revolutionizes the *aaS side of the net.

Amazon is a big player with AWS and this is the perfect opportunity for someone to come in and eat their lunch and change everything.

chj• 14 years ago

I don't see how you are going to fit those registers into CPU. This new kind of RAM will still be used for main memory.

The good news is we don't need hard disk any more. This will indeed change a lot of what we know about operating system.

bluehavana• 14 years ago

Memristors have the possibility to perform logic as well.

haberman4• 14 years ago

> Imagine 32Gb of CPU registers.

Sounds like the most expensive context switch ever.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

The point is you don't switch contexts, you maintain parallel contexts.

JumpCrisscross• 14 years ago

"At present, the endurance of DRAM is effectively a lifetime of usage"

Liked the article, but that's a self-referencing statement

modeless• 14 years ago

Perhaps they meant a human lifetime.

AndrewDucker• 14 years ago

It means the lifetime of the system it's placed in. DRAM will last until you've thrown away all of the other bits of your system.

ralfd• 14 years ago

DRAM is also commonly sold with a "lifetime warranty", which means the lifetime that the RAM is being made at the factory and they have the reasonable ability to replace it.

kzrdude• 14 years ago

It isn't. It introduces the term with quotes first: "endurance". Then this sentence defines what "endurance" means for DRAM.

rcthompson• 14 years ago

It's still not a replacement for DRAM, though. The article says it can only take a million rewrites before failing. Depending on what a computer is doing, I'll bet the main memory can easily hit that limit in days to weeks.

kondro• 14 years ago

It is a replacement for SSD, not RAM (at least for now). Imagine your permanent storage being as fast as your RAM.

Leynos• 14 years ago

Do you think this will be a driving impetus for the move from SATA to PCI Express connected backing stores in consumer hardware?

bwarp6• 14 years ago

So far. This will dramatically improve. Original transistors had a low MTBF but the chemical and electrical processes were tuned until this was a non issue.

This is literally like using transistors for the first time in the late 1950s.

cs702• 14 years ago

Memristors will have a major impact on hardware architecture in the near to medium term. They promise permanent storage not just without the costs imposed by SSD (much slower performance than DRAM), but also random access without the costs imposed by hard drives (variable seek times depending on how data happens to be laid out on physical discs).

IMHO the impact on software architecture is likely to be much less pronounced at first, because software ecosystems -- OS kernels, libraries, utilities, applications, etc. -- can evolve only gradually over a period of many years. Consider that Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie reportedly created the /usr directory because they ran out of space on a 1.5MB hard disk (!) more than 40 years ago (!), yet we're still living with this directory ( see http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074... ).

Memristor-based non-volatile memory matches DRAM performance

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