Linked by David Adams on Mon 16th May 2011 02:31 UTC
HP scientists have made a small breakthrough in the development of a next-generation memory technology called memristors, which some see as a potential replacement for today's widely used flash and DRAM technologies. In a paper to be published Monday in the journal "Nanotechnology," scientists report that they have mapped out the basic chemistry and structure of what happens inside a memristor during its electrical operation.
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2009-04-12
Hopefully a better understanding of the inner workings of memristors can lead to better cycling speeds. Last I heard a state to state change still takes in the neighborhood of a second which makes it unacceptable for most applications.
However, the idea of memory that is truly persistent based on the integral of the current through it could prove valuable.
Edited 2011-05-16 03:18 UTC
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Which appliances are so important that you can't be patient and wait a second, really. I'm not attacking the memristors, they look fantastic, but I'd like you to name ONE device where it is ESSENTIAL that it starts in less than a second??
We're talking about the change of state for a single bit, not how quickly a device would power on.
A second per bit would mean you could read this sentence quicker than the computer could: there's 8 bits per ASCII character thus it would take 8 seconds to read each character. In fact just reading the word "character" would take current memristors over a minute.
So clearly the current spec's fall far short of any usable speed. But this is technology is still in its infancy - so given time this could become a tempting new upgrade.
Member since:2009-01-09
Which appliances are so important that you can't be patient and wait a second, really. I'm not attacking the memristors, they look fantastic, but I'd like you to name ONE device where it is ESSENTIAL that it starts in less than a second??
Are you serious? That's 1 second to flip between states. One second for a memory location to flip from 0 to 1. Ok, now, remember that this is something that usually happens millions of times over & over within that one second. So, yes, it's a big deal that these things must become faster. Could you even imagine how slow today's computers would be if they used this technology in it's current state while running on the latest OS from Redmond??? Pay more attention to what's going on.
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2009-04-18
RE: software architecture
by Neolander on Mon 16th May 2011 14:38 UTC
in reply to "software architecture"
Member since:2010-03-08
If RAM will be equal to Disk.
Should we rethink the architecture of OSes and systems ?
(Sleep=Hibernate as an example)
Should we rethink the architecture of OSes and systems ?
(Sleep=Hibernate as an example)
You don't even have to go this far
To optimize performance, the core concept of loading something from the disk would have to be phased out. That's just a huge step away from the way all current OSs work. (As an aside, I don't think volatile memory will ever be equal to mass storage. What might happen, however, is that mass storage becomes so fast that the extra speed of DRAM doesn't matter for usual purposes.)
Edited 2011-05-16 14:38 UTC
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2011-05-16
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