magnetic ram

[rudder]

Check this out...

MRAM from IBM and infineon

Looks pretty cool. Soon you can just shut the power off on your PC then turn it back on and be working within a second or two.

 

[superbaby]

Woooo alternatives to RDRAM!

 

[Pretender]

Wow, actual innovation in the computer industry. I'm surprised.

 

[jtshaw]

Your surprised? Where have you been in the last 5 years...the computer industry is innovating more then any other industry out there by a long shot.

 

[Pretender]

I mean real innovation...not just some executives somewhere ordering their lab workers and factories to start putting out chips 100 mhz higher than last week. Think about it, what was the last real hardware innovation? Graphics boards? Maybe, but all they really do is move some of the work onto a separate chip. DSL/Cable? Perhaps, but it doesn't really take a genius to list all the wires that enter a house and determine how to make them transmit/recv. data.

Agreeably, small developments have been occuring over the last 10 years or so...reducing the size of transistors, increasing capacity of storage media, but the achievement of coming up with magnetic ram, something which will store it's contents after power down seems, IMHO, to fit in it's own league, and is the type of development that doesn't occur every day

 

[office boy]

Could lead to instant boot up.

 

[Looney]

Out of curiosity Pretender, what kind of industry are you in?

 

[Pretender]

I'm still in school (junior in HS), but I'm planning on going into the computer industry. Maybe I've taken an overly pessimistic view of things, but I'm in a pretty crappy mood right now.

 

[jtshaw]

I think you are looking at too narrow a scope. In the last 10 years there has been many many innovations in the computer industry. We have seen computers small enough to put on wrist watches and to carry in pockets. An entire new architecture has come together (Give it isn't exactly shipping yet but EPIC is effectively complete). IBM has created harddrive technology that inables a harddrive that takes half of a PCMCIA slot to hold a gig of memory using new density methods. DVD's technology has come together. The processes in which microchips are created have been changed drastically. Given none of this is completely new but there have certainly be huge changes.

Magnetic RAM is very cool, don't get me wrong, but they have also been working on it since 1974!

 

[jtshaw]

Ahh, I see, if you are a junior in HS it means you were probably around 6-8 years old in 1990 thus you don't realize how far we have come..... The internet was something that your average joe hadn't even heard about in 1990...take a look at things now..everybody is on the internet. Cisco created major routing technology, broadband technology was implemented (not just DSL and cable modems but the network to make them usefull). There is just too many things to list. In 1990 I had a 386 and that was decent computer...just to give you some more perspective.

 

[Pretender]

Processors have come quite far in a while...my first computer was a 386 about 5-6 years ago, I guess my comment was due to the annoyance I'm getting out of Intel and AMD making minor processor speed boosts which won't even really be fully useful for most people for another year or 2.

 

[pidge]

Instant boot up? How many people store their OS on their RAM? I think it will still be a while. If you want instant boot up, use hybernate available in Windows 2000 and Windows ME. That takes about 5 seconds to boot up.

 

[jtshaw]

I understand that completely, I had a 386 w/ 2MB of RAM for a long time, then I made the Jump to a i486 with 8MB or RAM. Finally 4 years later I picked up a P5-200MMX which was a great boost in proformance let me tell ya! Since then I have purchased a PIII550 which was another huge proformance boots. Now people are telling me I need a 1Ghz. Processor! That is garbage..my 550 does more then I ask it, in fact, my P5-200 is still more then adequete unless I am trying to run newer Windows releases. I guess I view my computer as a tool and not a gaming box so I don't feel the need to spend 2k every year to keep up.

 

[jtshaw]

The linux OS is almost always stored completely in RAM, if the chipset is done correctly and the RAM doesn't need power you could turn the computer off and turn it back on and have it up immediately with magnetic RAM. Also..Windows hibernation was very buggy last time I saw it, unless it has imporved it is less then reliable and not very quick either.

 

[pm]

I was looking at the preliminary list of papers to be presented at the Feb 2001 ISSCC conference and there are 3 papers so far on ferroelectric memory. It looks like they are actually starting to talk about real products. I wonder what the read and write latencies are. I've heard the write latency is slow. I can't see the linked page (it just kinda hangs), but it's good to see that real products are emerging.

Does anyone else think that it's ironic that magnetic memory started in computers (anyone else remember bubble and core memory technologies), disappeared for a long time and now are the "next big thing"?

As far as innovation, I agree with the other posters who refuted this comment. There's been a huge amount of innovation in the computing industry from software to hardware to communications and even ergonomics. I find it hard to believe that anyone who looks at what we used for computers 15 years ago and looks at what they are like now could say that there's no innovation in the industry. Maybe there haven't been a lot of revolutions, but you can have innovative evolutionary steps.

Even if you take the narrow view that the computer industry has been taking evolutionary non-innovative steps for the last decade or so, ferroelectric RAM is not a good example of an innovative revolutionary step forward since it's an evolutionary return to the very earliest forms of computer memory.