Sci/Tech ReRAM - Flash Memory Storage w/ RAM Speeds!

[Prometheus]

According to august engineering journal the EE Times, solid state storage specialist SanDisk is working on bringing a new form of system memory known as ‘ReRAM’ to market, a fact apparently revealed in a job ad posted on the company’s website last week.

Why is this interesting? Because ReRAM, or ‘resistive RAM’, is one of those disruptive technologies like wireless power or 4G that’s been under development for years, but is suddenly looking like it might happenin our lifetime. ReRAM could, if manufacturing kinks are worked out, replace both system RAM and hard drives in PCs of the future.

ReRAM is being touted as the successor to both current system memory chips and hard drives. And it’s not just SanDisk that’s been showing an interest in this super-storage of late.

The importance of ReRAM is that it combines the read/write speeds of DRAM – the stuff on those memory chips in your PC – with the non-volatile nature of flash memory. In other words, they don’t forget stuff when you turn the power off. Potentially, it’s the best of all existing technologies: bulk storage that runs at system memory speeds.

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[Accname]

[...]
The importance of ReRAM is that it combines the read/write speeds of DRAM – the stuff on those memory chips in your PC – with the non-volatile nature of flash memory. In other words, they don’t forget stuff when you turn the power off. Potentially, it’s the best of all existing technologies: bulk storage that runs at system memory speeds.[/URL]

Thats nothing "new" since we could have this already in our computers. We already have the technology and the materials and we can manufacture memory units which are stable, fast and reliable. The only downside is the cost, your computer would cost so much you couldnt afford to live in a house anymore.
We would just need to use the stuff they take to build cpu cache units and build it in a size similar to ram chips.

 

[Switch33]

I agree with accname. Flash memory is not a better memory source it's more about able to store safer, but by combining flash and ram together it could be less safe. You can use a flashdrive(uses flash memory) as a ram if you find a correct tutorial about it. However the issue is that the flash memory is no better than regular ram because flash memory is made to be useable even after being taken out(think USB being injected out without safely remove hardware) so it is more stable than regular ram but has a slower reading speed.

Whoever wrote this article doesn't really understand the differences between flash memory and regular ram in the sense that they are thinking it will replace all ram period. Purchasing ReRam to replace a bunch SSDs might not provide a good enough benefit to be worth it.

I'm gonna purchase a new computer in like 2-3 years anyways, so this is good news. Maybe they can better explain how this is really "worth" it by then when they have real product lines out.

 

[Accname]

the actual RAM we use right now in our computers is, to be honest, complete bullshit.
We only use it because of one reason, its cheap. Thats it.
Its unstable, unreliable, the computer has to refresh it every 10 seconds or the information will be lost. It needs so much power because of this reason and can actually break pretty easily.
But its cheap. We can build 16 gigabit of it for little cost.

Flash now, has a whole other problem at hand. Flash memory is breaking apart each time you write something on it. Whenever data is stored on a flash memory device it is getting more and more damaged until it doesnt work anymore. It is "throw-away" hardware and you cant really use it as RAM.
(I was shoked when i was told about this too since i never paid attention to it before)

The best kind of memory units we have right now are so called flip-flops. These things can store single bits reliable and they are incredibly fast. If we put several thousands of these together we get high quality memory units we currently use in our CPU's and GPU's as cache. Drawback? They cost alot of money and they are comparably big in size.

Maybe that ReRAM is just a smaller and cheaper variant of storing information in a stable form. Could very well be. But the point is, we could do it since the 80's but we dont because of the cost.

 

[Varine]

Yeah but if done appropriately it could effectively remove the necessity for transferring between RAM and hard drives, which would dramatically increase system performance at the cost of having to replace it on occasion.

 

[Accname]

Yeah but if done appropriately it could effectively remove the necessity for transferring between RAM and hard drives, which would dramatically increase system performance at the cost of having to replace it on occasion.

I dont know, could make way for new kinds of viruses. Things on the harddrive are safe in that regard that you cannot "really" run programms directly from the harddrive. In order to be used it got to be loaded into the RAM first which is a good occasion to scan it for malware.

 

[Varine]

I dont know, could make way for new kinds of viruses. Things on the harddrive are safe in that regard that you cannot "really" run programms directly from the harddrive. In order to be used it got to be loaded into the RAM first which is a good occasion to scan it for malware.

You could still involve protective systems. Just because it would have the ability to run on demand doesn't necessarily means it has to. It would effectively be the same thing only minus the transfer; I don't see security as being an issue.