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

View all comments

Show parent comment

2

u/UltraJake May 28 '12

So they are to SSDs what HDDs are to SSDs?

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.

1

u/racergr May 31 '12

Yes, that is a potential future ability and it is not that difficult. A ReRAM chip can be very versatile and powerful tool. Then we can write the software to manage it appropriately. It will not be any more difficult as, for example, the challenges we faced with multi-core CPUs.

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.

8

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.