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So it apparently makes their custom flash storage behave like RAM, and provides an API to OS and software developers to make use of it as such, but it's non-vol

So it apparently makes their custom flash storage behave like RAM, and provides an API to OS and software developers to make use of it as such, but it's non-volatile, so everything persists in the case of power failure or reboot. Here's an informative quote from Wozniak from the press release: "Instead of treating flash like storage, where data passes through all of the OS kernel subsystems that were built and optimized for traditional storage, our core ioMemory technology offers a platform with new programming primitives that can provide system and application developers direct access to non-volatile memory." http://www.fusionio.com/press-releases/fusion-io-breaks-one-billion-iops-barrier/ http://www.fusionio.com/press-releases/fusion-io-breaks-one-... Here's hoping the other company by which he's still nominally employed gets interested in this technology, so that many more can enjoy the benefits of this technology. It seems like storage is the main bottleneck for most computing these days, so this should save us a whole lot of man-years waiting for our computers.

dchuk 15y ago
I'd say bandwidth is the main barrier for most computing nowadays, followed closely by storage
hristov 15y ago
I am not sure this is exactly it (or perhaps I am misunderstanding your post). With present technology you simply cannot replace RAM with flash. Flash is still much slower to write than RAM. They have achieved very high throughput by using mass parallelism but I am sure that each individual cell writes just as slowly as it used to before. I think their innovation is not to replace RAM with flash but to have flash automatically mirror a range of RAM. Thus, using their software you can designate an area of RAM to be mirrored or backed up if you will, and what ever you do with that area of RAM, the fusion IO software will save it and try to have an area of flash that is the exact mirror of your area of RAM. Thus, when you are doing programming you can simply work in RAM without having to worry about saving your data, or writing to a file, etc. The fusion IO will make sure it saves your state so that if you lose power your program can restart from the latest RAM snapshot that was saved in flash. It will probably work, but it seems like something that would be mostly useful in very expensive systems with very high failure resiliency requirements (such as stock exchange systems). If you do not need super high failure resiliency, it might be cheaper to just get one of those motherboards with an on board 12V back up battery (i.e., the ones used by Google). I doubt this would be very relevant for Apple.
- joshu 15y ago
  No, but you could, say, have 16 gb of ram, 16gb of flash, and enough battery to sync it if the power goes out.

dchuk 15y ago

I'd say bandwidth is the main barrier for most computing nowadays, followed closely by storage

hristov 15y ago

I am not sure this is exactly it (or perhaps I am misunderstanding your post). With present technology you simply cannot replace RAM with flash. Flash is still much slower to write than RAM. They have achieved very high throughput by using mass parallelism but I am sure that each individual cell writes just as slowly as it used to before. I think their innovation is not to replace RAM with flash but to have flash automatically mirror a range of RAM. Thus, using their software you can designate an area of RAM to be mirrored or backed up if you will, and what ever you do with that area of RAM, the fusion IO software will save it and try to have an area of flash that is the exact mirror of your area of RAM. Thus, when you are doing programming you can simply work in RAM without having to worry about saving your data, or writing to a file, etc. The fusion IO will make sure it saves your state so that if you lose power your program can restart from the latest RAM snapshot that was saved in flash. It will probably work, but it seems like something that would be mostly useful in very expensive systems with very high failure resiliency requirements (such as stock exchange systems). If you do not need super high failure resiliency, it might be cheaper to just get one of those motherboards with an on board 12V back up battery (i.e., the ones used by Google). I doubt this would be very relevant for Apple.

joshu 15y ago
No, but you could, say, have 16 gb of ram, 16gb of flash, and enough battery to sync it if the power goes out.