Mram

[DDR-PIII]

I read this in Maximum PC about 1 week ago...

MRAM May Give Boot Times The Boot
Firing up Windows XP in less than 30 seconds is good. But a PC that boots up in no time is better. The promise of MRAM, a technology being devloped by Sandia National Labs & Pacific Northwest National Lab. The two R&D houses have devloped a process that dramaticaly reduces the thinkness of the layers present in conventional microelectronics. The new methor uses a chemical reaction to spread atoms evenly above a metalic surface that can bind easly to the layers above them. The short story is that not only will such memory be much faster than today's RAM, but it will also require so little voltage, it could be made nonvolatile (in other words, it wont lose the data when your PC is turned off).



MMMM The many times I have dream of such a thing... Loading windows to memmory :D..... what are you comments on this ?

[ManOfKnight]

sounds like ATLEAST 10 years away...even IF they COULD get this accomplished...we wouldn't see this for YEARS!!! I wouldn't mind a memory that has a bandwidth that is unGodly...that is my dream in life LoL

[ninthebin]

does sound a tease...but I think we will all miss the boot times, after all we were all here when it took about 30minutes to boot to dos...*sigh* the days :)

[koby]

or imagine like Windows NT 4.x boots... wow those are a solid 10 minutes haha

[NookieN]

The MRAM they're talking about is probably magnetic ram, a technology that stores bits on a chip using magnetic fields rather than electric charge. These chips have been out for a couple years now.

Their main advantage is that they retain data when the power is shut off. But they're very low density. A typical chip might be 1Mb -- tiny in comparison to the 128Mb used in standard DRAM. It also has lower performance than current ram. Hopefully the technology mentioned in that article will lead to some breakthrough in the field.