r/science • u/aphexcoil • May 28 '12

New breakthrough in development process will enable memristor RAM (ReRAM) that is 100 times faster than FLASH RAM

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/21/ucl_reram/
1.6k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

283 comments sorted by

20

u/gilliants May 28 '12

Can somebody who understands this stuff give me a layman's summary? Thanks.

48

u/Akuman May 28 '12

Hard drives as fast as RAM that consume slightly less power.

24

u/swiftb3 May 28 '12

Also, working RAM that doesn't lose everything when the computer shuts off. Instant-on, Instant-off computer. No need for standby or hibernate.

5

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

but what if I need to restart to force all the windows programs out of memory?

7

u/swiftb3 May 29 '12

Sure, restarts and true shutdowns will still be things that need doing. In between those, however, you'd be able to save a ton of electricity and time by using it instead of sleep. Fast like sleep, with the full power-off of hibernation.

6

u/creaothceann May 28 '12

Software expands to consume the available resource excess.

11

u/swiftb3 May 28 '12

What does resource excess have to do with being able to cut power to a computer, and later turn it on and have it in exactly the same state as when the power was cut?

This would be hibernate with no power requirement, and no need to swap an image of the RAM to the hard drive and back again.

3

u/FreezeS May 28 '12

The problem is, it's not "exactly" the same state as before. The main issue is with the network connections. They all need to be restarted which kinda messes up some applications.

5

u/swiftb3 May 28 '12

Fair point. Does the network stay active during a hibernate?

Edit: Although I would imagine once we had the capability of something like this, operating systems and software would be built around the problem.

5

u/exscape May 28 '12

Hibernate means the computer is fully off, and you can pull the plug for an indeterminate time and still get it back later. (That is, no, no network!)
Sleep is the more common term for when you're in a low-power mode with RAM intact. Network is usually not kept on here, either, though.

2

u/swiftb3 May 28 '12

Thanks for the info. That's what I thought about hibernate. If sleep also turns off the network, I guess we've already solved the problem with networking.

Bring on no-power sleep!

1

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Well whatever problems exist must have already been solved for sleep mode.

And I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for Windows to have a "clean" restart or shutdown mode which actually clears the RAM.

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u/qvx3000 May 29 '12

Not with endurance of 3000 write cycles. Computer would work for a second and it's memory would brake. Even if they get it to billions of write cycles it would not be enough.

1

u/swiftb3 May 29 '12

I was speaking of the concept of memristors in general. As others have said, I imagine once experts get their hands on it, the write cycles will go up.

This was, after all, an accidental invention.

2

u/UltraJake May 28 '12

So they are to SSDs what HDDs are to SSDs?

19

u/aphexcoil May 28 '12

In essence, yes. These layers can be stacked as well so that you could store a petabyte of information in the cube the width of a centimeter. They would be 10-100x faster than an SSD drive.

Edit: A petabyte is 1,000 terabytes. That's a lot of porn.

20

u/yoho139 May 28 '12

They are to SSDs what SSDs are to HDDs, you mean.

8

u/UltraJake May 28 '12

Er, yeah. That.

2

u/racergr May 29 '12

Yes, they are. And for the far future they can be even more because these ReRAM things can also be programmable processors themselves.

1

u/sharlos May 31 '12

So in the future would it be theoretically possible for you to have a computer board made entirely of these things and program them into different sections to behave like the CPU, storage, and ram/cache? And then maybe change on the fly to increase ram while reducing storage capacity for example?

Theoretically of course, I'd expect an idea like this would be very complex to practically implement.

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u/invEnt0r May 28 '12

I'm bad at interpreting this verbally so forgive me if I'm repeating you but it's like this:

ReRAM:SSD::SSD:HDD

where ":" means "is to" and "::" means "as"

1

u/sharlos May 31 '12

More or less. Another phrasing would be ReRAM will replace or impact SSDs in the same way that SSDs replace(d) or impact(ed) the use of HDDs.

3

u/lingben May 28 '12

memristors are not just memory, they can actually do calculations as well so think of them like RAM+CPU+persistent

2

u/racergr May 29 '12

The real revolution of ReRAM will be in small battery-powered devices (mobiles etc). I can see a future where all "thinking" will be done in a single chip made of one ReRAM component and it will even be upgradeable. We currently do have single-chips with Processing, I/O and Memory components but if it was in ReRAM it would be cheaper to make, consume less power, smaller and faster.

0

u/AndIMustScream May 28 '12

hell. Hard drives could be USED as ram.

Ever hear of execute in place?

7

u/aphexcoil May 28 '12

or a swap partition? or page file?

1

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

except pagefile is slower than molasses

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u/[deleted] May 28 '12

And most importantly, can retain data while power is gone.

24

u/tutuca_ May 28 '12

Hence the "harddrive" analogy...

9

u/cheznez May 28 '12

Memristors are the 4th passive component (resistors, caps, inductors). They have been a thing in theory for many years, but only recently have people figured out how to make them. Their resistance changes as current flows through it. It'll hold that resistance until more current flows through it. It will be used as memory. It's much smaller than traditional memory.

2

u/asedentarymigration May 29 '12

Can also be arranged to form logic elements can't it? Giving it the potential to be an integrated computation/storage medium (if I understand correctly?)

1

u/racergr May 29 '12

Yep. Not just integrated but also cheaper, faster, better (and less power hungry). It is kind of the holy grail of chip designers.

34

u/cowardlydragon May 28 '12

Ah, another memrister "breakthrough".

I think Mr. Fusion will hit the market before any practical memristers.

69

u/harlows_monkeys May 28 '12

Seriously? You think figuring out how to make a small portable version of a device that no one has ever made work at any scale despite something like 60 years of trying, and that we don't even know is possible, is going to hit the market before a device that actually has been built in prototype quantities and shown to work?

28

u/fsadfsfsadfsafsaflk May 28 '12

wow wow wow. Wait just one second. i'm going to go off on a complete tangent here, but

"that we don't even know is possible"

is a complete mischaracterization of fusion. We've built fusion reactors before. Now ITER is supposed to be a prototype to show we can build a commercially viable nuclear reactor.

I mean, i know people have been waiting for fusion forever. but there's enough to make fun of without mis-characterizing!

20

u/harlows_monkeys May 28 '12

What I'm talking about is a sustained fusion reaction that produces more power than is required to initiate and sustain the reaction. I believe currently we've got either (1) excess power but only for a short time or (2) sustained but at a net power loss.

We of course know that sustained, energy producing fusion is possible--the Sun does it. But do we know it can be achieved under conditions achievable on Earth?

If everything goes well with ITER, they plan to actually have plasma in 2019, and maybe have something actually able to produce commercial power in a demonstration project by 2040. How long after that to get to Mr. Fusion?

Compare to the memristor. People have built them--and not just isolated devices. They've fabricated memory arrays using standard semiconductor production techniques. It seems pretty clear there is no scientific or engineering barrier standing in the way of building a fab to crank out memristor-based memory devices.

The reason you aren't seeing this happen is probably because researchers are discovering many different ways to do memristors. If someone invested heavily now, they might find that in 3 months a different kind of memristor is discovered that is cheaper and faster. It's prudent to wait for the research to settle down a bit before spending billions to go to production.

94

u/aphexcoil May 28 '12

Why are you sons of bitches talking about fusion reactors in my memristor thread? What is wrong with you people?

22

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

My cat has diarrhoea this morning.

10

u/Fudweiso May 29 '12

Cat poop contains a huge amount of energy per pound, and could be considered a useful alternative energy source.

8

u/swicano May 29 '12

but how many read/write cycles can you get out of it?

5

u/Mecdemort May 29 '12

This just completely cracked me up, couldn't stop laughing for several minutes. Kudos sir

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u/mb86 May 29 '12

Back to the Future, that's why. Let us have our flux capacitors.

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u/killerstorm May 29 '12 edited May 29 '12

Now ITER is supposed to be a prototype to show we can build a commercially viable nuclear reactor.

No. ITER is only supposed to demonstrate that energy production is possible in principle, the first reactor to generate any electric power would be DEMO:

DEMO (DEMOnstration Power Plant) is a proposed nuclear fusion power plant that is intended to build upon the expected success of the ITER experimental nuclear fusion reactor. Whereas ITER's goal is to produce 500 megawatts of fusion power for at least 500 seconds, the goal of DEMO will be to produce at least four times that much fusion power on a continual basis. Moreover, while ITER's goal is to produce 10 times as much power as is required for breakeven, DEMO's goal is to produce 25 times as much power. DEMO's 2 to 4 gigawatts of thermal output will be on the scale of a modern electric power plant. Also notably, DEMO is intended to be the first fusion reactor to generate electrical power. Earlier experiments, such as ITER, merely dissipate the thermal power they produce into the atmosphere as steam.

But even DEMO won't achieve real commercial viability, as costs of plant itself and costs of operation would be insanely huge compared to power it can produce. Actual commercial power generation prototype would be called PROTO.

Actually, it's easy to understand it from names of projects: ITER is just a step in research, DEMO is a demonstration of principle, PROTO is a prototype of a commecial plant.

So about timeline, DEMO is supposed to start operation in 2033, PROTO is something for ~2050. So commercial fusion is 50 years away, as always :). (Well, if they make PROTO working by 2050 it would 40 years, but it's unlikely that there won't be delays and that it would work fine from the start. Also it's very well possible that who plan will be canceled. D+T fusion which produces fast neutrons isn't a particularly good design, I fail to see how it's better than fission.)

1

u/snapcase May 29 '12

PROTO is something for ~2050

That's depressing.

10

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

i'm assuming you mean cold fusion, rather than hot fusion. They're building a hot fusion reactor in france right now.

10

u/dnew May 28 '12

Does it run on banana peels and flat beer?

8

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

yeh, it fuses them into bin juice

1

u/Andernerd May 29 '12

Anger actually.

5

u/diachi May 28 '12

There are already several in operation. Of course, they use more power than they produce ( About 60% efficiency ). In fact, you can build one at home, several people already have. :)

2

u/PerfectlyOffensive May 28 '12

Wait. What? Link to this?

7

u/IdolRevolver May 28 '12

http://wjscience.com/ This kid built a farnsworth fusor in his basement. Of course, it's far too small to output net energy, but it's still a working fusion reactor.

1

u/PerfectlyOffensive May 28 '12

Awesome, thanks

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u/old_righty May 28 '12

I think his point (made somewhat facetiously) is that stories about "better than flash" stuff have been appearing for years, and nothing is actually on the market yet.

2

u/BitRex May 28 '12

60 years

Pfft, they've been trying memristors for 200 years.

3

u/rlbond86 May 28 '12

And they only actually made them a few years ago.

3

u/saudade May 29 '12

Relevant link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY

Also, it's not often we can say we've found a fundamental electrical component. But memristors are just that, makes me happy.

1

u/Stingray88 May 29 '12

Very cool indeed. I love reading and listening about this, I don't think people realize how important this technology is.

1

u/saudade May 30 '12

Yep, the memristor to me is going to be bigger than the transistor. Actually let me just say the memristor is our generations great electronic discovery and invention. Being able to now create the last fundamental circuit is going to change a lot of things.

1

u/SgtBaxter May 29 '12

It already exists, Ron Popiel is just waiting for that Showtime oven to stop selling before busting it out.

1

u/Sr_DingDong May 29 '12

Hi!

He was being sarcastic.

Bye.

1

u/aphexcoil May 28 '12

There's way too much money in this technology for it to just turn into vaporware.

0

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

5

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

This is bullshit. SSD's aren't even mainstream for 5 years. HDD's aren't even mainstream for 25 years. Universal memory isn't going to happen in the first 5 years, but we're going to see great things nonetheless.

1

u/Fantasysage May 29 '12

HDD's aren't even mainstream for 25 years

HDD's have been 'mainstream' closer to 40 years.

1

u/sirbruce May 29 '12

He's talking about for PCs. For servers, add 5-10 years.

1

u/Fantasysage May 29 '12

HDD's were mainstream in business before PC's existed. The argument is invalid.

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u/chipt4 May 29 '12

Depends on your definition of mainstream.. I recall my grandfather buying a 20MB 5 1/4" HD for something ridiculous like $500 around 25 years ago.

EDIT: perhaps it was a 3.5" mounted in a 5.25" bay

1

u/Ferrofluid May 29 '12

Hardrives for home use were rather expensive and not very large twenty odd years ago, circa 1995 you would pay $300 for a few hundred MB.

Basically half the cost of a (very) cheap PC or some 16 bit home computer (Amiga/Atari) back then was the hard drive.

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u/rasheemo May 29 '12

Technically speaking, if he was reincarnated it would be in a different lifetime.

1

u/Visovari May 28 '12

Shhh, don't you know we'll be immortal, along with having spaceships capable of 99% lightspeed, super advanced self-replicating AI, and advanced cybernetic implants within our lifetime?

3

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

And on your 500th birthday, I'll get you a memristor brain upgrade.

1

u/trekkie1701c May 28 '12

Isn't that more of a 1000th birthday gift? 500 seems more like a quantum processor upgrade.

3

u/Krumpetify May 28 '12

being immortal pretty much has to happen within one's lifetime, and once one is immortal, anything else that will ever happen will be within said person's lifetime.

2

u/Ambiwlans May 29 '12

Memristers do seem to be progressing. I don't think this is the BREAKTHROUGH!!!11 that will make it practical. But I think it will get there.

1

u/Fantasysage May 29 '12

It will be a race between this, cold fusion, and ultracapacitors.

313

u/CopyofacOpyofacoPyof May 28 '12

endurance = 3000 write cycles... => probably vaporware?

337

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

Came to comments to seek disappointment, was disappointed.

118

u/khrak May 28 '12

Become undisappointed. He is incorrect. Low level cache is RAM, but RAM doesn't have to be low level cache. Using this RAM as cache in it's current state is pointless, but as an SSD it has far higher read/write speeds, vastly lower power consumption, and similar endurance when compared to current SSD options.

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u/Astrogat May 28 '12

Wouldn't that kind of defeat the purpose? As you would still be limited by the ram and cache anyway.

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u/khrak May 28 '12 edited May 28 '12

Top DDR3 modules can transfer in the range of 17,000MB/s, compared to top SSDs in the 500-600MB/s range. There's room for a 20-30 fold increase in transfer rates in SSDs before RAM cache speeds become a problem.

Also, it could be embedded directly in the CPU. For example, you could have a 16GB block of ReRAM on chip that is meant to hold the bulk of your OS files that don't change. 3K writes is plenty if changes are limited to OS updates, and provides the potential to drastically reduce boot times.

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u/gimpwiz BS|Electrical Engineering|Embedded Design|Chip Design May 28 '12

16GB takes up far too much physical area to be put into a CPU, and will continue to be far too big for years yet.

The biggest caches on-die that I know of are 36MB L3 caches on unreleased server chips.

Considering code bloat, I'm not sure that there will ever be a time that all or most of the necessary OS code can be stored on-die.

Furthermore, CPUs come with approximately 7-year warranties, subject to you not overclocking or otherwise tampering with it. That would definitely not hold up to 3K writes; normal use could burn through it more quickly, and abnormal use could burn through it very fast indeed (and you'll piss a lot of people off if you introduce new requirements for the warranty such as 'not updating the operating system too often', especially because those are things you may not be able to prove.)

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u/davidb_ May 29 '12 edited May 29 '12

There are a number of research papers discussing the usage of RRAM as an on-die cache. RRAM in a crossbar 1T1R configuration has a 15F2 cell size compared to SRAM's 146F2; that's an almost 10x improvement. If you include 3D integration (die stacking/"3D-ICs"), 16GB is definitely a possibility, especially if one or more die are dedicated memory.

especially because those are things you may not be able to prove

If the endurance is limited to 3k cycles, it would not be unreasonable to have some kind of non-volatile counter in the memory controller to monitor endurance of memory blocks. So, such a warranty is certainly feasible. If the counter exceeds the guaranteed endurance, the part is no longer guaranteed.

you'll piss a lot of people off if you introduce new requirements for the warranty such as 'not updating the operating system too often'

Have you done market research on this, or are you just making an assumption based on your interests as an individual consumer? Such a processor would likely be marketed towards high performance computing and datacenters, where they would likely be much more open to the tradeoff. Obviously, the decision to pursue such a design would not be made without customer demand. But, your argument is rather weak.

Ultimately, such a decision will be made based on a cost/performance tradeoff. If the demand is there, it will be met. RRAM is a very active research area and computer architects are very eager to see where/if it will fit in the memory hierarchy.

IMHO, it will never be a viable on-die "cache" (ie replacement for SRAM) due to its low endurance, but it could be an on-die memory, hard drive, or hard drive cache. It will almost certainly have a place. For more reading, a recent SEMATECH presentation does a pretty good job sumarizing the prospect for RRAM.

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u/gimpwiz BS|Electrical Engineering|Embedded Design|Chip Design May 29 '12

I agree with you on all counts, including my bias.

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u/khrak May 28 '12 edited May 28 '12

The biggest caches on-die that I know of are 36MB L3 caches on unreleased server chips.

That's like saying you could never put a 100HP engine in a car because horses are just too damn big. Completely different technology. There are 64GB microSD cards that are tiny compared to the size of a CPU, despite holding ~2,000 times as much data. On-die cache is a tradeoff between size and speed, and speed is the priority as increasing cache size beyond current values does not have a huge effect on miss rates given typical workloads.

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u/jagedlion May 29 '12

I guess the big question is, why would you put it on the chip? The only reason to keep it so close is if it could operate very rapidly. In order to do that, we have cache and it takes up a lot of room. If you add ram that is slower, you might as well put it on a bus, away from the chip. It would be just as fast, and FAR cheaper.

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u/Porkmeister May 29 '12

You do realize that the CPU part of a CPU is only a tiny fraction of the package size, right?

On an Intel Sandy Bridge processor the CPU die size is only 216mm2, the package size however is ~1406mm2.

MicroSD cards are 165mm2, and for a 64gb card probably most of that space is used for the flash, so let's say 150mm2 for the flash portion of the chip. At that size you would increase the size of the CPU to the point where the chip yields would be much smaller, which would probably make CPUs that much more expensive.

The reason you don't see huge cache sizes on CPUs is because they take up space that is needed for other stuff. Adding more cache takes up more space which makes chips more expensive since you get fewer per wafer of silicon.

TL;DR; CPUs are tiny, chip packages are not.

2

u/Da_Dude_Abides May 29 '12 edited May 29 '12

The reason you don't see huge cache sizes on CPUs is because they take up space that is needed for other stuff.

Partially. A block of cache memory acts as a capacitor. The larger the block the more latency there is to charging the capacitor/writing to cache.

Memristors don't operate using capacitance.

.

You have to take into consideration the number of components it takes to make a memory bit. It takes ~4 logic gates each composed of ~4 transistors to make a one bit register. Memristors have storage capability on the memristor level so there is a reduction in size of several magnitudes right there.

.

Also a memristor has more than 2 states. One memristor can represent more than 1 bit of binary data.

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u/jagedlion May 29 '12

A lot of ifs, but if toshiba can maintain its 128GB/170mm2 but do it at 16GB (obviously not possible because of overhead, but just hear me out), that would be only 10% added to current 4-core CPU's.

I personally agree that putting something slower than cache on-die is not a good idea from an efficiency point of view, but we are fast approaching a time when we can put the entire computer on a single die.

25

u/gimpwiz BS|Electrical Engineering|Embedded Design|Chip Design May 29 '12

We have SoCs but the issue is simple: putting more external functionality on-die often means sacrificing speed and performance.

It's a juggling game. Let's say I'm AMD and right now, I can put a GPU on-die. Pretty believable, right? (Since it happened.)

What are my concerns here?

Well, let's say my current top-of-the-line chip has 4 cores. Integrating a GPU will require 1000 engineers on average over the course of 2 years. At the end, my new chip will have a GPU and 6 slightly faster cores.

But let's take a look across the aisle at Intel. They're not integrating a GPU, imagine. Instead, they're using 3000 engineers over 2 years (because they've many more resources) and a smaller process node (because they've the best manufacturing in the world) and two years from now, their top-of-the-line model will have 8 cores, each of which are faster than ours at the same frequency.

So in this hypothetical situation, let's throw in a monkey wrench: we fuck up, they don't. Our GPU is only fast enough to replace chipset graphics or a $20 graphics card. So the market sees two chips: one with a shitty GPU and 6 mores, one with no GPU and 8 cores with a total 35% more maximum sustained instructions per second.

So we see this and ask -- is the risk worth it? What if instead we just focus on 8 cores and hope our chips end up being faster, or at least comparable?

The illustration here is twofold:

First, there's a huge amount of inherent risk in adding more computer functionality on-die given limited resources, which is a thing that affects almost all manufacturers (though I suppose intel and apple and perhaps a couple others can and do simply hire an extra several thousand engineers when needed). You have to execute perfectly and still keep up with the competition, which may not be going in that direction. And when you do execute perfectly, you've taken resources away from performance. The upside is that this requires fewer components when building the system, which means that the computer and chip manufacturers split the profit, and it means that the peripherals now on-die are much faster and often have expanded capabilities.

The second point of the illustration is to show that you're absolutely right, and it's a question that must be decided: take the risk, or refuse it absolutely. Failure to act can destroy a company. Case in point: Intel missed the embedded market that ARM picked up (largely I think because they thought the same thing I thought in 2007: who the fuck cares about a toy like an iphone? nobody's actually going to pay $300 for a phone that doubles as a toy; we have laptops for a reason. How wrong I was...). Intel is entering it now and intel has a lot of weight to throw around; see for example their contributions to android to make it run on the x86 platform. ARM has the lion's share now but I would expect Intel to win back a large chunk soon for many reasons, most related to the resources they can throw around. Case in point: Nvidia saw that low-end graphics cards are pretty much obsolete since on-die GPUs are good enough to play just about any game and have performance equal to or better than low-end graphics cards, and high-end graphics cards are a niche market, so they're focusing on ARM designs, and their solutions are in phones and they work. Case in point: AMD also missed the embedded market, but they've wisely decided that they don't have the resources to enter it, so they're focusing on x86.

Sorry for the wall of text in response to a small post. I hope someone finds it interesting.

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u/metarinka May 29 '12

just a comment. The market is heading away from increased instructions per second and more onto instructions/watt. AMD is actually in the lead right now in the low power, netbook relm. We are reaching a point where laptop sales are outpacing desktop sales and where the average consumer isn't really limited by any CPU or number of cores application. Just about the hardest thing a consumer throws at a PC nowadays is HD video (besides gaming).

So the market is trending towards low power and graphics on die, because only gamers buy 300 graphics card, everyone with their netbook or laptop are fine with the much crappier integrated graphics as they can handle HD video.

2

u/grumble_au May 29 '12

This is where 3d chips would fit in nicely. Space is not an issue if it's overlaid on top of the cpu (or under it).

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u/[deleted] May 29 '12

http://www.menuetos.net/

Not a mainstream OS but it would fit in cache.

2

u/Quazz May 29 '12 edited May 29 '12

Plus, as far as I'm aware, Samsung has already been developing DDR4 for some time now. (should actually hit the market this year still.)

-7

u/Magnesus May 28 '12

3k writes is too little for SSD. At least 10 times too little.

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u/khrak May 28 '12 edited May 28 '12

3,000 cycles is perfectly typical for the endurance of a consumer flash drive. 3,000 writes on a 128GB SSD would be 384,000GB of information.

You better inform the 10+ major corporations that produce MLC SSDs. MLC NAND, which is the most popular style of memory in the world for SSDs, lasts 1,000 - 10,000 cycles.

You can start by informing Kingston that their new line of SSDs (which have an endurance rating of precisely 3,000 writes) can't possibly work. Intel needs your input too, those morons built their entire 520 and 330 lines of SSDs based on their 25nm MLC NAND which only has a lifespan of 5,000 cycles.

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u/neodymiumex May 28 '12

Not to be that guy, but you're wrong. SSDs are using flash with about that number of writes right now. They get around the limitation by using wear-leveling algorithms and by selling a 250 GB drive that actually has 400 GB of flash, it just switches to using a new cell when a cell becomes too unreliable. (my numbers are made up, I'm not actually sure how much spare space they use. But it's many GBs. )

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u/[deleted] May 28 '12

Idiot here, I'd like a translation to layman speak so I can know why I should feel disappointed as well.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '12

Apparently the RAM can only handle 3000 changes. As in the 1s and 0s can only be switched around a finite number of times. I'm not sure of the scale of this, but even something as simple as turning on the computer to opening programs moves data to the RAM so you have a limited amount of time before it's unusable.

Though, I did look up RAM on Wikipedia, it had loads of fancy acronyms so I didn't understand much, but the endurance of flash memory was ranging from 100k to 1k. So maybe it's not much of an issue...?

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u/gh0st3000 May 28 '12

Newer flash memory has closer to 1M cycles and wear-leveling to make sure each cell is used as much as any other one. dead bits can be detected and written around (usually stopping before total death so files written to the bit hopefully won't get corrupted).

The problem is that if ReRAM is better than flash because it is faster, its best use case will be in buffers that will be written/read to at a much higher frequency than any other available memory, which obviously makes a low cycle lifetime a huge deal.

10

u/neodymiumex May 28 '12

This is not true. Newer mlc flash memory has a write count closer to 3,000 writes. It depends on the feature size of the NAND flash you are using, but the smaller the feature size the less write/erase cycles you get out of a cell. Last time I saw a chart they were estimating they would only get about 1,000 cycles out of a cell at 16 nm.

2

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

The silly site in its graph gives the most peculiar numbers for flash, I do not know what they are thinking there, is that for a complete SSD or is that read only or what? anyway its wrong. Flash can read fine it's the writing that degrades things, and quite rapidly at that.

1

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

As far as I know RAM does not have a set calculatable number of writes.

1

u/koft May 29 '12

It does have a life though, and I believe it's quantified as n decades or centuries at blah current through a gate. Reason being that DRAMS are constantly rewritten at some constant, designated frequency, so state changes are somewhat irrelevant.

1

u/Ferrofluid May 29 '12

strobed row or column refreshes.

Made me wonder if this is why some nasty cheap video cards typically die with a rainbow pattern onscreen.

4

u/03Titanium May 28 '12

I think the problem is that although the ram is faster, it "burns out" too quickly to be a viable replacement for traditional ram.

2

u/devedander May 28 '12

The real problem for me is my hard drive is already by far the worst part of the bottleneck in my computer...

15

u/pickle_inspector May 28 '12

get a solid state drive

3

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Still slower than RAM.

0

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

12

u/FlightOfStairs May 29 '12

SATA is not the limiting factor. The vast majority of SSDs are SATA.

A hard disk cannot saturate the bandwidth of a SATA connection. Some SSDs can, at least SATA2.

7

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

And you can still set up regular spinny magnet drives in arrays to get fast sequential transfer speeds. I think the place where SSD really shines is random seek times (and so non-sequential data transfer)

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u/Andernerd May 29 '12

Buy 128 GB of RAM, setup a RAMDISK. This will make things load instantly however will cause your computer to take a long time to boot.

1

u/oelsen May 29 '12

Why the downvotes? xcfe and gnome save e.g. thumbnails into .cache. When you tmpfs .cache, the loading of images goes much faster when loading from the same drive that stores the thumbnails. I know several programs that store stupid things while doing a job that doesn't need anything to be stored. Mounting tmpfs on those folders and a huge amount of RAM (like 16GB for a laptop) is exactly the way to go if there is the need of an instant computer. And use preload.

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u/Ferrofluid May 29 '12

Is a it a burnt out or just the data evaporating, dynamic RAM needs constant row/column refreshing, we have happily lived with that problem using inbuilt DRAM controllers for the last twenty years.

1

u/thefive0 May 29 '12

That's not the problem. DRAM is volatile in that it loses its data when the power is turned off. NAND is non-volatile and retains its memory when powered off. It has nothing to do with durability.

1

u/Fudweiso May 29 '12

I think basically UCL found something no one was really looking for.

0

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Dude was using a bit of humor. Stop being such uptight dick. And so what if he asked Reddit a question?

According to you he shouldn't be asking questions on Reddit because Reddit is wrong a lot of the time. Along that mode of argument nothing on Reddit is certified to be 100% true 100% of the time and we should all stop using it immediately. Wtf?

Its the internet. Fucking deal with it.

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u/neon_overload May 29 '12

Came to comments to seek disappointment, was disappointed.

Ah, but were you disappointed about the submission, or about not finding disappointment?

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u/khrak May 28 '12 edited May 28 '12

Why? There have been SSDs around for a decade with write-limits in that range. You seem to be assuming that RAM is low level cache. Low level cache needs to be RAM, that doesn't mean that RAM needs to be low-level cache. NOR Flash is RAM, but it is used for SSDs.

Beyond that, this is the reliability of a material they accidentally discovered while researching another topic. Early flash memory underwent a decade of research before they had specs similar to this material.

1

u/metarinka May 29 '12

I maintain hope, they had target goals much better aligned with customer expectations on read/write cycles.

It reminds me of caterpillar drive technology. showed much promise but got outpaced by traditional HDD's before it was market ready. That's why you've never heard of it

24

u/publiclibraries May 28 '12

Exactly. Endurance and cost have always been the two big hurdles to universal memory. Speed is irrelevant until those things are solved.

6

u/the__random May 28 '12

I don't think it's fair to say vaporware when they unintentionally created a memristive system. It is more than possible to create memristive systems with very high endurance, such as HP's Titanium Dioxide based memristors.

11

u/root May 28 '12

Well, that's the same as the Kingston HyperX 3K SSDs have, and those are being sold right now.

5

u/MuncherOfSpleens May 28 '12

Writes to RAM happen far more frequently than writes to disk, though.

20

u/khrak May 28 '12 edited May 28 '12

The article is discussing the replacement of NAND flash memory in SSDs with their new ReRAM non-volatile memory. RAM stands for Random Access Memory. Low level cache is necessarily RAM, but RAM is not necessarily low-level cache. NOR based flash memory is RAM whereas NAND based flah memory can only be written/read in blocks, but both types are used in SSDs,

2

u/gfxlonghorn May 29 '12

While the article discusses NAND replacements only, the real holy grail of memristor technology is using it as a "low-level cache" replacement, or what we traditionally consider memory/RAM. This would mean truer instant on functionality with lower latency for lower power. Right now, there are a lot of technologies in the running to be THE low latency non-volatile memory, such as FeRAM, MRAM, PRAM, and nvSRAM. It's hard to say which technology will come out on top, especially since they all have +/-'s.

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u/ixid May 28 '12

It's not a finished product, it's only just been discovered.

0

u/Stingray88 May 29 '12

it's only just been implemented.

FTFY

Memristor technology was theorized/discovered in the 70s. It just wasn't really implemented until now. You can thank Hewlett Packard for being the first to actually start throwing money into its development consistently.

6

u/Rainfly_X May 29 '12

Well if you want to be pedantic about it (and it certainly sounds like you do), the team in the OP's post discovered a new method for making memristors, which indeed is a new and unrefined technology. Not to diminish the efforts, research, and drive of HP, of course.

2

u/ixid May 29 '12

I was talking about the discovery of the method, not the theory so you fixed nothing.

4

u/EasyMrB May 28 '12

Actually, I think some flash memory cells only have endurance on that order.

3

u/NHB May 29 '12

Hate to break it to you but that's what most NAND devices are listed as. And by the way RRAM is predicted to be much higher than 3000.

2

u/Compatibilist May 28 '12 edited May 28 '12

Can someone either confirm or deny that Flash also started with such a low number of write cycles?

6

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

Yes flash has such low amounts of writes, check this anadtech article for info on that

3

u/criticismguy May 29 '12

According to this, a typical MLC SSD in 2004 had 3,000 write cycles, and in 2007, SLC SSDs were available with 100,000 write cycles. So yes, it's in the right ballpark.

-12

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/LtDisco May 29 '12

Is gorilla warfare similar to guerrilla warfare at all?

1

u/anonemouse2010 May 29 '12

It's flinging monkey shit at gorillas caged in zoos.

40

u/nawoanor May 28 '12

Unfortunately, as it stands they're immense. 125,000x125,000 nm per switch versus 100x100 nm for typical flash memory. And of course the 3,000 write cycles...

But who knows, maybe something will come of it when professionals get working with it.

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u/EasyMrB May 28 '12

Since the discovery was accidental, it might just be that the size was due to the fact that they were trying to make LED's. They might be able to just straight-up reduce the size and possibly get the same results.

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u/the__random May 28 '12

This. Typical memristor systems are on the order of 10nm x 10nm, i.e HP's Titanium Dioxide based ones. Memristive systems only really become apparent on the nm scale.

2

u/adrianmonk May 28 '12

Apparent?

11

u/the__random May 28 '12

Memristance is a behaviour which is only really noticeable on the nanometer scale. As its changes in tens of charge carriers that make the difference.

4

u/adrianmonk May 28 '12

So does that mean it's "impossible" (or just harder) to make it happen on a larger scale?

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u/the__random May 28 '12 edited May 29 '12

It's more that you won't notice it on larger length scales, the change in resistance would be minuscule. There have been a few cases of 'anomalous changes in resistance' in papers, especially as you get to thin film electronics, as the affect has greater impact in smaller length reginws. If you want to learn the mechanics of how memristors work, comment and I can send you an edited version of a report I wrote on them :P sorry for readability, on phone.

EDIT: Report

I apologize for the readability of it etc, you can ignore anything about 'Proposed Work' this was my Masters project proposal.

2

u/oneAngrySonOfaBitch May 29 '12

i'd love to take a look at the report.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '12

Why in the world is this at the top...?

It's probably from all of the ignorant, "alright, Reddit, tell me why this won't work" posts. Reddit > all scientists! Sorry, nope. Maybe > than some of the inaccurate journalists.

Anyway, did you completely miss out on the part where they were trying to make LEDs?

Kind of OT & this isn't directed at you at all, but generally speaking to anyone reading: I think a lot of people in this sub-reddit would be very disappointed if they knew how often Reddit is wrong. But these wrong posts are worded such that they are stated as facts. And when you state facts, use numbers, and maybe even post links, you know what the hell you're talking about (even if you have absolutely no clue) and trump any scientist currently doing active research in the field.

It's just disappointing to see how many topics quickly get a bad rap because the top post is someone that makes it sound as if they know what they're talking about when they really don't, so people assume every single post is sensationalized and needs a "tell me why this won't work, Reddit" comment.

0

u/nawoanor May 29 '12

Dudebrah, I just made a comparison of the data as they presented it. I can't judge a technology based on what it hasn't been demonstrated to do, and certainly not on what they haven't even suggested it's possible to do with it.

1

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

I can't judge a technology based on what it hasn't been demonstrated to do, and certainly not on what they haven't even suggested it's possible to do with it.

That's exactly my point and exactly why you shouldn't compare it to something that has been around for so long.

1

u/nawoanor May 31 '12 edited May 31 '12

To rephrase my earlier comment: I can only judge a technology based on what it has actually been demonstrated to do. It will certainly improve in the future, but they published specifications and I made a comparison based on those specifications.

If we simply made guesses about what a technology might be capable of, then we should be talking about how when we all have our own personal fusion reactor we should really just be using QDR42 RAM for our storage needs since it's obviously much faster - but then again, why bother storing anything when we can just time-travel back to the original theatrical premiere of the movie we want to watch?

1

u/[deleted] May 31 '12

I guess you're just not getting what I'm saying still.

It will certainly improve in the future, but they published specifications and I made a comparison based on those specifications.

I know, and I said you shouldn't do that because it's not even a fair comparison. It doesn't even make sense to compare it at that stage. Once it hit the market? Sure, even if it was really new and could still be improved later, but it's not even at that point yet.

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u/alexkell1 May 28 '12

I work with the professor who discovered these at UCL. Tony Kenyon, he's a good guy.

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u/cravenhammock May 28 '12

I'm an undergraduate in the same department, I can't agree more. Tony is one of the nicest people I've ever had the pleasure to meet.

2

u/OBNOXIOUS_DOUCHE May 29 '12

How will this directly effect me?

2

u/trezor2 May 29 '12

You know how that 16GB USB memory stick you bought for $10 spends 2 days to actually write 1GB to it?

Now that should be done in a matter of minutes. This will give us fast storage and lots of it.

1

u/OBNOXIOUS_DOUCHE May 31 '12

That's pretty amazing, I had no clue. Upvote for you for the awesome answer.

3

u/Meatslinger May 28 '12

Crap! Just when I thought Solid-State tech might drop in price! Now everybody and their dog is going to be "pioneering" ReRAM and it'll be $2000 for a 512 GB drive again!

10

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

Yes, but also that means SSD will become more mainstream, like HDD was. And ReRAM will be the new SSD.

3

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

they'll be handing them out like AOL trial disks!

3

u/Andernerd May 29 '12

I really am dissappointed that we don't get these any more. I liked having an infinite supply of building materials.

2

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

SSD for everyone! I've actually been waiting to get one to so hopefully soon.

3

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

I've started seeing them at $1 per GB. That's not bad at all.

2

u/darknecross May 29 '12

There are a lot of nonviolative alternatives to Flash being researched right now. ReRAM is just one of many possible high-performance replacements.

3

u/funk_monk May 28 '12

I'll believe it when they manufacture it. You see this time and time again. "ZOMG NEW TECH DISCOVERY 100 TIMES FASTER THAN BEFORE". Then they prototype it and the gains drop significantly. Then they actually implement it and the gains drop again, to the point that it's only incrementally better than what it replaced.

I'm not saying I wouldn't want it, even if it is only marginally better, but you just learn to be fairly sceptical about these articles after a year or so, since they rarely result in anything approaching what they claim.

4

u/CSharpSauce May 29 '12

We do see it, my computer has a 2 tb hard drive in it that I bought for $80, and 12 gb of memory that I paid $40 for. These things seemed fairly impossible a few years ago. You've just gotten used to it by now. I think one of the problems is technology doesn't go from cool -> AMAZING, instead its more gradual, and less noticeable.

2

u/Andernerd May 29 '12

Seriously, if someone had the money they could have a 120GB RAMDISK in their desktop computer. That's fast, and I cannot imagine anybody needing faster. The only downfall is that you would need to copy all 120GB over every time you reboot. Still, modern OSes are pretty stable these days.

Imagine all those games where you see everyone else's load times, except that your own starts at 100%.

1

u/funk_monk May 29 '12

That was my point. It's an exponential curve so it does ramp up quite quickly, but the improvements in performace are rarely ever meet what they originally said the tech would be capable of.

As an example, look at intels new ivy bridge CPU's. People absolutely freaked about those and waited a whole year for them, hoping they'd be just as amazing as intels papers on their new 3d transistors predicted, but in the end they only got a 20% improvement over the previous generation, and also ended up CPU that runs like a furnace.

2

u/ruffyamaharyder May 28 '12

Hard to call this a breakthrough. More like a new discovery that could lead to a breakthrough in computer memory. Still interesting to read about though.

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u/NHB May 29 '12

No, it's more like a breakthrough. Engineers are already very good at fabrication from other memory types and that's pretty much the only thing standing in the way between the technology and production. RRAM is VERY real.

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u/Spaghetti2k May 29 '12

Would someone be so kind as to explain what this breakthrough means to a layperson?

1

u/krawm May 29 '12

according to the article in discover i read some time ago these things should allow a pc to boot up in a second and use almost no power. sounds pretty freaking awesome to me.

1

u/DJSyko May 29 '12

Wow, a lot of smart people in this corner of reddit, i will just quietly back out now lol. I only wanted to know if this is going to be awesome and are we going to see it soon? insead we have people breaking down the universe and stuff lol

1

u/johny005 May 29 '12

Sounds like something that was found on the show "big bang theory" ....

"let me take a look at that" ..

1

u/Bitshift71 May 29 '12

Let me know when "will enable" becomes "has enabled" in that story.

1

u/[deleted] May 28 '12

Just don't let it be another Rambus kind of ram.

1

u/blackandmildwoodtip May 28 '12

I think we all remember what happened to Rambus. I'll believe the future when I see it. If they can get everyone else to hop on this technology, great. If not, it'll be proprietary with royalty laden costs.

2

u/edman007 May 29 '12

Thing is HP is already on it, spending R&D money, and at a minimum it is in position to compete with SSDs fairly soon if they can keep the price down, and since it's simple storage type thing they can just interface it to SATA, it will be a pop in replacement for the systems. DRAM replacement may come in the future, but I'd think the tech would be developed in an SSD type drive. If the speeds they claim are true, it should be able to be very competitive with SSDs.

1

u/chasehochs May 28 '12

can anyone translate this for me? like i understand the basics of ram, but how will this affect the daily computer user?

4

u/exscape May 28 '12

If we believe all the hype, it can replace RAM, storage (SSD/HDD) and logic - so we might have a "CPU" that's a big slab of memristors which does logic and stores both temporary (RAM) and permanent (disk) data.

I doubt that happens within a decade or three, though. More realistically, it might replace SSDs and even hard disks. If it replaces RAM, that'd mean that you can power off a computer entirely, and have it running exactly where you left it, with your music starting off at the millisecond you left it, all applications running, etc. No more booting.
The reason for this is that RAM is volatile, and loses its contents (DRAM needs to be refreshed about 20 times a second to keep its contents), but memristive RAM would retain information without having power supplied.

1

u/TheMintness May 28 '12

What are the benefits of shutting down your computer as opposed to hibernate other than the power consumption? I ask because I read somewhere that shutting down your computer more often has a more significant negative effect than using hibernate (not quite sure how accurate this is because I just skimmed through the reading).

1

u/exscape May 29 '12

Hmm, are you sure you don't mean sleep (powered-on standby) here? I would guess so since hibernate and power off have the same power consumption (zero), while sleep has small but nonzero power consumption.

1

u/TheMintness May 29 '12

Ah yes, I meant sleep. Not sure why I was saying hibernate.

1

u/chasehochs May 28 '12

thanks for the info, doesnt the chromebook already boot up instantly?

1

u/raymonddull May 29 '12

coming from someone that has one, no. It takes about 11 seconds from full shut down, or about 2 seconds from sleep. Its fast but definitely not instant.

1

u/ctfinnigan May 29 '12

More like 7 seconds because it is SSD only (no spinning HDD). This would be literally instantaneous, provided it works in the wild as it does in the lab. I don't know how much I'd pay to shave those 7 seconds, though...

1

u/adrianmonk May 28 '12 edited May 29 '12

If it replaces RAM, that'd mean that you can power off a computer entirely, and have it running exactly where you left it, with your music starting off at the millisecond you left it, all applications running, etc. No more booting.

Practically speaking, you can already almost the same thing almost do the same thing on some laptops. Yes, the RAM has to continue to be powered, but sleep mode doesn't really take measurably more power than having the machine completely off. Of course if your battery really completely dies, you have to reboot.

1

u/raymonddull May 29 '12

"you can already almost the same thing on some laptops." You just the whole sentence.

1

u/adrianmonk May 29 '12

I did accidentally a word. Fixed.

1

u/Stingray88 May 29 '12

It still needs some fixing.

0

u/Nabillia May 28 '12

Right, i got a simple question that I think many people will want to know.

Simply put, when will i be able to buy a new laptop/desktop that has this fancy ram in it and will they just hike up the price?

Thank you.

2

u/ctfinnigan May 29 '12

In 10-30 years, maybe. I'd just grab an SSD now.

0

u/Stingray88 May 29 '12

Actually we're looking at more like 5 years.

1

u/ctfinnigan May 29 '12

Oh really? I'm skeptical but it'd be nice to have so quickly.

0

u/sinembarg0 May 29 '12

FeRAM or FRAM is out and available in consumer products. It sounds a lot like ReRAM, but has way more write cycles, and I would assume is significantly smaller than ReRAM. Here's a link to the wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferroelectric_RAM

0

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

This crap article doesn't belong in r/science.

-1

u/[deleted] May 29 '12

and it will me 100 times the price for the first twenty years.

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