Yoused
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- Aug 14, 2020
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I have been reading a bit about Spin Transfer Torque memory, and it seems intriguing. The advantages look too appealing to ignore.
At present, one company, Everspin, has a 1Gb chip available, which suggests to me that this tech may be starting to crest the horizon.
Like old-fashioned core memory from the '60s, STT-RAM holds data in magnetic domains (nano-tracts of paired chip real estate, rather than tiny magnets woven into a wire grid) and is non-volatile. Unlike core, it is not read-destructive (though the read/write flux difference is disturbingly tight).
The large chip runs at two-thirds of a GHz, so it is a tad slow compared to DRAM (DDR3, AIUI). At that speed, it looks barely usable – unless significant alterations are made to L3 cache protocols and/or memory hierarchy layout (e.g., some kind of sectoring scheme that allow a large block of L3 to be used as a unit, such as for a stack).
But, for a phone, STT-RAM looks eminently worthwhile. Saving the DRAM-refresh penalty could bring us back to phones you need to charge weekly rather than daily.
When it arrives in tablet and notebook devices, it is likely that battery life will, again, be counted in days rather than hours. And "Off" will basically mean what "Sleep" does now (you will literally have to do a purge-reboot operation to fix some issues). And while it may seem kind of pointless for a desktop, we do occasionally have power outages, which would amount to but a blink in one's workflow, rather than a restart (lost work) or UPS box alarm.
What are the concerns? I am not clear on this, but if portable devices are moving toward induction charging, magnetic domain memory damn well better be properly shielded – but, we had magnetic surface HDs for decades without major field interference issues. What about security? If it is NVRAM, your transient data is not wiped with a shutdown, so the OS better be designed to properly clean memory as needed (or use sectored-L3-only for sensitive transient data).
And of course there is price. These chips will start out as more expensive than DRAM, so the improved new devices using it will cost more. I am betting that many of us will be clamoring for the new stuff.
At present, one company, Everspin, has a 1Gb chip available, which suggests to me that this tech may be starting to crest the horizon.
Like old-fashioned core memory from the '60s, STT-RAM holds data in magnetic domains (nano-tracts of paired chip real estate, rather than tiny magnets woven into a wire grid) and is non-volatile. Unlike core, it is not read-destructive (though the read/write flux difference is disturbingly tight).
The large chip runs at two-thirds of a GHz, so it is a tad slow compared to DRAM (DDR3, AIUI). At that speed, it looks barely usable – unless significant alterations are made to L3 cache protocols and/or memory hierarchy layout (e.g., some kind of sectoring scheme that allow a large block of L3 to be used as a unit, such as for a stack).
But, for a phone, STT-RAM looks eminently worthwhile. Saving the DRAM-refresh penalty could bring us back to phones you need to charge weekly rather than daily.
When it arrives in tablet and notebook devices, it is likely that battery life will, again, be counted in days rather than hours. And "Off" will basically mean what "Sleep" does now (you will literally have to do a purge-reboot operation to fix some issues). And while it may seem kind of pointless for a desktop, we do occasionally have power outages, which would amount to but a blink in one's workflow, rather than a restart (lost work) or UPS box alarm.
What are the concerns? I am not clear on this, but if portable devices are moving toward induction charging, magnetic domain memory damn well better be properly shielded – but, we had magnetic surface HDs for decades without major field interference issues. What about security? If it is NVRAM, your transient data is not wiped with a shutdown, so the OS better be designed to properly clean memory as needed (or use sectored-L3-only for sensitive transient data).
And of course there is price. These chips will start out as more expensive than DRAM, so the improved new devices using it will cost more. I am betting that many of us will be clamoring for the new stuff.