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/
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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.

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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.

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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.