News UltraRAM Breakthrough Brings New Memory and Storage Tech to Silicon

[Admin]

UltraRAM Technology Offers DRAM-like Speeds, Plus Non-Volatility for a Thousand Years, and AMD may Pioneer.

UltraRAM Breakthrough Brings New Memory and Storage Tech to Silicon : Read more

 

[peachpuff]

When an article starts with scientists you're in for disappointments.

 

[tennis2]

I'm not well-versed on silicon manufacture, but that layout "stack" photo looks pretty complex and has me questioning whether that would be feasible cost effective. Not sure how this compares to a similar diagram of the stacked NAND used in SSDs. The UltraRAM stack has soooo many different elements, shapes, sizes, and locations comparatively. Not just a repeatable stack like 3d vNAND

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Mobile phones and tablets would be the first real benefits of this technology, assuming it's price competitive, since they don't depend on GDDR or HBM. We could finally see the end of 4GB models running Android, which is on the edge of usability now, and the speed would be perfect for advanced 4K and 8K recording, and perhaps finally move up the base specs to larger than 128GB, which is becoming a less attractive option given how the MicroSD slot is being removed on more devices. Other devices like ATMs, POS terminals, and set top boxes would also see a benefit.

Outside of these markets, and perhaps specialized systems for datacenters where the cost savings of having a unified block of memory for RAM and storage, again assuming its price competitive, would bring an advantage, along with its non-volatile nature which would help minimize data loss in the event of an unexpected power loss, I have a hard time seeing it making inroads quickly.

Although I can also see AMD and nVidia using it on their professional series GPUs in the same vein as the Radeon Pro SSG to complement the on board GDDR or HBM.

 

[timberland67]

Unless it's faster than DDR it will never be adopted for desktop/laptops as an all in one solution. Nobody wants to degrade their RAM speed just to combine the two. They should instead focus the technology to be used to make faster SSD's.

 

[Findecanor]

Tech compared:

Phase-change RAM:	10**8 erase/write cycles	Temperature-sensitive
UltraRAM:	10**7 erase/write-cycles
3D crosspoint	10**7 erase/write-cycles
MRAM	10**8 erase/write cycles	Degrades with reading. Error rates increase with writing speed.
FeRAM	10**10 read/write cycles	Reads are destructive, so a cell would need to be rewritten after every read
NAND Flash:	1000 erase cycles
Memristor		Only theoretical ("vaporware")

It has sometimes been said that to be comparable to DRAM in endurance, a NVRAM technology would need to support 10**12 erase/write cycles.

I read a bunch of research papers on OS/software using NVRAM not too long ago, and it was clear that some issues still need to be resolved before NVRAM can be used as RAM:
• NVRAM still needs error detection and correction ... like on a SSD.
• NVRAM systems still need to do over-provisioning and wear-levelling ... like an SSD
• Direct access to fast NVRAM could allow malware to wear out individual cells in short time. Writes must therefore be controlled at a manageable rate.
• Read-destructive types of NVRAM still needs to be cached in DRAM
• When NVRAM is mapped into an address space, there needs to be protection against bugs in the kernel/drivers from "scribbling" into NVRAM.

 

[Krotow]

No doubt that mentioned memory type will found use in embedded devices and very fast storage devices. About using it in desktops... the next thing we want is non-volatile system memory where viruses and other malicious code can survive rebooting and power cycles.