5 ms·

IBM develops 'instantaneous' memory, 100x faster than flash

265 points by alvivar 15y ago

InclinedPlane 15y ago
Faster than flash, much higher write-cycle lifetime than even SLC flash, if these hold up in mass production it'll be like christmas for everyone.
- zquestz 15y ago
  Even if they are expensive, everyone will want these. I know I will be first in line. If these are reliable, and their drift friendly modulation works, we probably won't see spinning disks in 10 years. Thats a great future.
  - aidenn0 15y ago
    I disagree. If they cost 4x as much as flash, then nobody will use them unless the performance improvement is huge (Remember, it's 100x write latency not throughput, and caching fixes latency problems quite nicely).
Joakal 15y ago
To differentiate it from RAM, the word is PRAM. More: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Phase_change_memory https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Phase_change_...
- r00fus 15y ago
  Looks like this is the only pram you can buy right now: http://www.google.com/search?q=pram&tbm=shop http://www.google.com/search?q=pram&tbm=shop
  - keenerd 15y ago
    It is easy to buy. I think I've some sitting around unused just because it is so neat. http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=NP5Q128A13ESFC0E-ND http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&... http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=NP8P128A13BSM60E-ND http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&...
- jvandenbroeck 15y ago
  damn, pram.com is already registered
  - jevinskie 15y ago
    Are there ANY 4-letter domains available anymore?
    - hugh3 15y ago
      If there are, there certainly aren't any which are widely-used English words like "pram".
- glhaynes 15y ago
  Hope it doesn't have to be regularly zapped. #oldmacuserjoke
rkalla 15y ago
Whenever I see announcements like this, I try and cap my enthusiasm -- I think reading about solid-state-drives in the 90s and not getting them until... well the last 2 years, I have learned to be cautious with falling in love. THAT being said, this article suggests mass-production on a timeline of 5-years (give or take) along side other innovations like Intel's 50Gbps Thunderbolt.next() [1] I'm really gunning for the world not ending Dec 2012 now; I want to see this stuff in a desktop PC ;) Aside: It is fun to think about what changes to current industries would occur when computing power becomes insignificant -- for example, video editing/production, video games, voice recognition, security, etc. Just in our industry, with the cost of a GB dropping to damn near $0.00, the first thing we saw was an explosion of apps dealing with huge data sets -- something previously only done by a few select mega-corps. Anyone, just speculation and fun at this point. [1] http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/29/intel-touts-50gbps-interconnect-by-2015-will-make-it-work-with/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/29/intel-touts-50gbps-interc...
- miahi 15y ago
  Actually, commodity hardware that you can buy today for less than $1000 would have made it to the top tiers of HPC Top500 just 11 or 12 years ago. But most of this was done in a step by step evolution of old technologies, not in a revolutionary way, because most of the revolutionary technologies that make the news are not really feasible for mass production (at least at the time of the discovery - remember the costs of the solid-state drives back in the '90s).
- jodrellblank 15y ago
  What sort of apps dealing with huge datasets?
  - olalonde 15y ago
    Here's a nice intro to "Big Data": http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/02/startup-facebook-twitter-technology-data.html http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/02/startup-facebook-twitter-te...
- rlpb 15y ago
  There isn't a business case for getting new technologies in mass production so quickly. Businesses price to maximise profits, which isn't necessarily anything to do with production cost. It's more profitable to sell at a high price to early adopters first, and then gradually bring the price down.
stupidhurts 15y ago
incidentally, does anyone know how close memristor cells are to mass production?
- juiceandjuice 15y ago
  I saw a talk last week that said 3 years. Supposedly HP is in talks with Hynix currently.
  - warfangle 15y ago
    Is there video of the talk available?
- Devilboy 15y ago
  They were supposed to be here in 2009 but right now HP is saying 2013. They keep pushing it back so who knows.
jacques_chester 15y ago
I would have preferred a straight-bat presentation, rather than the strained hangover jokes.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- mapleoin 15y ago
  There's a big button with the words Press and Release on it.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Maybe, but the journalist's job is to take the press release and make it better, not worse. If you ask me, the most interesting question is "So how does this thing actually work?" And the answer according to engadget is "PCM is based on a special alloy that can be nudged into different physical states, or phases, by controlled bursts of electricity", or in other words "Fuck, I don't know, I didn't really understand the press release" The press release is more informative. You put some undisclosed material between two electrodes. The material can be crystalline or amorphous, and you can tell which it is at any given time by the resistance. To change it from one to the other you simply heat it up with a voltage pulse to one threshold temperature or another. Neato!
jvandenbroeck 15y ago
It's time to buy some IBM shares
maeon3 15y ago
Now the bottleneck will be the CPU in a huge way. Intel we need a few orders of magnitude faster processors now!
- tobylane 15y ago
  Nope, northbridge/southbridge will be the bottleneck. They currently run at half the speed of RAM, 400-700mhz. Cycle speed at least, throughput is good.
ajays 15y ago
Wasn't IBM also responsible for bringing the Giant Magneto-resistive (GMR) technology to the spinning disk drives, thereby increasing their capacity many-fold? It looks like they'll do the same to flash with this PCM memory. Keeping my fingers crossed. PS: Did anyone else notice the gratuitous mention of "cloud computing" in the press release? :-D
zwieback 15y ago
Aren't the wear-out numbers for flash understated? I seem to remember that the flash I've worked with is in the tens to hundred thousand cycles already but maybe that's not what's in consumer products? Also would be interesting hear about power consumption for read and write.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  Flash used to last much longer. But flash these days is used in MP3 players etc. I would imagine the average number of writes is something like .... 1. Because when my boys fill up a gadget, they buy a bigger gadget. Like most folks. Even an SSD drive used as a system volume gets written maybe 1 time. SUre some blocks get thrashed, but wear-leveling means they write different blocks. So an mtbf of a dozen would probably serve.
  - weaksauce 15y ago
    If you only use it for system volumes it will still get written to multiple times with os upgrades, security fixes, and atime modifications. If you don't pull out the page/swap file/hibernate file you are going to be writing those often as well.
DharmaSoldat 15y ago
It will certainly be interesting to see what happens with technology like this when it gets combined with others such as graphene, memristors, etc. I agree with rkalla that tempering one's hopes towards it is probably the way to go, but it's always nice to see someone pushing the envelope.

265 points by alvivar 15y ago

Faster than flash, much higher write-cycle lifetime than even SLC flash, if these hold up in mass production it'll be like christmas for everyone.

zquestz 15y ago
Even if they are expensive, everyone will want these. I know I will be first in line. If these are reliable, and their drift friendly modulation works, we probably won't see spinning disks in 10 years. Thats a great future.
- aidenn0 15y ago
  I disagree. If they cost 4x as much as flash, then nobody will use them unless the performance improvement is huge (Remember, it's 100x write latency not throughput, and caching fixes latency problems quite nicely).

Joakal 15y ago

To differentiate it from RAM, the word is PRAM. More: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Phase_change_memory https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Phase_change_...

r00fus 15y ago
Looks like this is the only pram you can buy right now: http://www.google.com/search?q=pram&tbm=shop http://www.google.com/search?q=pram&tbm=shop
- keenerd 15y ago
  It is easy to buy. I think I've some sitting around unused just because it is so neat. http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=NP5Q128A13ESFC0E-ND http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&... http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&name=NP8P128A13BSM60E-ND http://search.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll?Detail&...
jvandenbroeck 15y ago
damn, pram.com is already registered
- jevinskie 15y ago
  Are there ANY 4-letter domains available anymore?
  - hugh3 15y ago
    If there are, there certainly aren't any which are widely-used English words like "pram".
glhaynes 15y ago
Hope it doesn't have to be regularly zapped. #oldmacuserjoke

rkalla 15y ago

Whenever I see announcements like this, I try and cap my enthusiasm -- I think reading about solid-state-drives in the 90s and not getting them until... well the last 2 years, I have learned to be cautious with falling in love. THAT being said, this article suggests mass-production on a timeline of 5-years (give or take) along side other innovations like Intel's 50Gbps Thunderbolt.next() [1] I'm really gunning for the world not ending Dec 2012 now; I want to see this stuff in a desktop PC ;) Aside: It is fun to think about what changes to current industries would occur when computing power becomes insignificant -- for example, video editing/production, video games, voice recognition, security, etc. Just in our industry, with the cost of a GB dropping to damn near $0.00, the first thing we saw was an explosion of apps dealing with huge data sets -- something previously only done by a few select mega-corps. Anyone, just speculation and fun at this point. [1] http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/29/intel-touts-50gbps-interconnect-by-2015-will-make-it-work-with/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/29/intel-touts-50gbps-interc...

miahi 15y ago
Actually, commodity hardware that you can buy today for less than $1000 would have made it to the top tiers of HPC Top500 just 11 or 12 years ago. But most of this was done in a step by step evolution of old technologies, not in a revolutionary way, because most of the revolutionary technologies that make the news are not really feasible for mass production (at least at the time of the discovery - remember the costs of the solid-state drives back in the '90s).
jodrellblank 15y ago
What sort of apps dealing with huge datasets?
- olalonde 15y ago
  Here's a nice intro to "Big Data": http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/02/startup-facebook-twitter-technology-data.html http://www.forbes.com/2010/11/02/startup-facebook-twitter-te...
rlpb 15y ago
There isn't a business case for getting new technologies in mass production so quickly. Businesses price to maximise profits, which isn't necessarily anything to do with production cost. It's more profitable to sell at a high price to early adopters first, and then gradually bring the price down.

stupidhurts 15y ago

incidentally, does anyone know how close memristor cells are to mass production?

juiceandjuice 15y ago
I saw a talk last week that said 3 years. Supposedly HP is in talks with Hynix currently.
- warfangle 15y ago
  Is there video of the talk available?
Devilboy 15y ago
They were supposed to be here in 2009 but right now HP is saying 2013. They keep pushing it back so who knows.

jacques_chester 15y ago

I would have preferred a straight-bat presentation, rather than the strained hangover jokes.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
mapleoin 15y ago
There's a big button with the words Press and Release on it.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Maybe, but the journalist's job is to take the press release and make it better, not worse. If you ask me, the most interesting question is "So how does this thing actually work?" And the answer according to engadget is "PCM is based on a special alloy that can be nudged into different physical states, or phases, by controlled bursts of electricity", or in other words "Fuck, I don't know, I didn't really understand the press release" The press release is more informative. You put some undisclosed material between two electrodes. The material can be crystalline or amorphous, and you can tell which it is at any given time by the resistance. To change it from one to the other you simply heat it up with a voltage pulse to one threshold temperature or another. Neato!

jvandenbroeck 15y ago

It's time to buy some IBM shares

maeon3 15y ago

Now the bottleneck will be the CPU in a huge way. Intel we need a few orders of magnitude faster processors now!

tobylane 15y ago
Nope, northbridge/southbridge will be the bottleneck. They currently run at half the speed of RAM, 400-700mhz. Cycle speed at least, throughput is good.

ajays 15y ago

Wasn't IBM also responsible for bringing the Giant Magneto-resistive (GMR) technology to the spinning disk drives, thereby increasing their capacity many-fold? It looks like they'll do the same to flash with this PCM memory. Keeping my fingers crossed. PS: Did anyone else notice the gratuitous mention of "cloud computing" in the press release? :-D

zwieback 15y ago

Aren't the wear-out numbers for flash understated? I seem to remember that the flash I've worked with is in the tens to hundred thousand cycles already but maybe that's not what's in consumer products? Also would be interesting hear about power consumption for read and write.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Flash used to last much longer. But flash these days is used in MP3 players etc. I would imagine the average number of writes is something like .... 1. Because when my boys fill up a gadget, they buy a bigger gadget. Like most folks. Even an SSD drive used as a system volume gets written maybe 1 time. SUre some blocks get thrashed, but wear-leveling means they write different blocks. So an mtbf of a dozen would probably serve.
- weaksauce 15y ago
  If you only use it for system volumes it will still get written to multiple times with os upgrades, security fixes, and atime modifications. If you don't pull out the page/swap file/hibernate file you are going to be writing those often as well.

DharmaSoldat 15y ago

It will certainly be interesting to see what happens with technology like this when it gets combined with others such as graphene, memristors, etc. I agree with rkalla that tempering one's hopes towards it is probably the way to go, but it's always nice to see someone pushing the envelope.