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I don't expect to see Ferro DRAM any time soon, it looks like one of those next year things (forever).
First of all, I wasn't talking about "Ferro DRAM" whatever that is. Ferromagnetic RAM is certainly not dynamic - it doesn't need any refresh by definition. So, perhaps you're talking about a different product.
This is what I have been talking about:
http://www.ramtron.com/doc/Products/overview.asp
I have a 256 Kbit FRAM on my shelf - I have had it for about a year now, and have been using it in some of my designs. My IC belongs to a batch that has a 10E8 rewrite cycles. Ramtron has now upped the number of rewrite cycles to infinite, for the same IC.
For a comparison, Flash RAM whitstands up to 10E5 rewrites at best. Worse yet, the writes are sectorized: you can't write just one bit, you have to rewrite a whole cell/sector (can be several K). Flash RAM is very bad for writes, and hence, I guess, has not found large acceptance for non-embedded OSes.
It will be interseting to see if a iMiniMac will run Zeta/BeOS/Haiku too.
Do you mean the PPC version of these OSes? I don't know if there's a PPC version of Zeta, I suspect there isn't. Yet.





Member since:
2005-07-08
I don't expect to see Ferro DRAM any time soon, it looks like one of those next year things (forever). But I would hope that the USB Flash drives could get faster, much much faster, I think they are only at 2MBytes/s even with USB2 because the demand hasn't been for speed, just size.
On the subject of nice, I also noticed that in the SFF arena there are now Athlon (Geode NX <10W, not the old NS Geode) and Pentium M miniITX boards popping up as well as a SFF IWIll dual Opteron but not exactly in the retail channel yet.
It will be interseting to see if a iMiniMac will run Zeta/BeOS/Haiku too. My biggest issue is getting any SFF machine to drive 2 monitors at >>1600 res.