11 ms·
UltraRAM
- omneity 3y agoOptane Resurgence? The tech looks super cool if it does get commercialized.
- alecmg 3y agodefinite deja vu from Optane Capacity and price killed it, no word about these in the article
- hwillis 3y agoOptane made loading the OS super fast, but the OS still has to fill up RAM. No matter what, loading up 2+ GB of ram will always take noticeable time. Even flat out, Optane takes >1 second to boot, and several seconds to restore a session. Cost permitting, this stuff would replace RAM, not the drive. No more loading into ram; now the bottleneck is loading into cache and that will always be trivially fast just because cache is so small. Even if its too expensive to replace RAM, if it can fit the minimum bits of an OS then I think cold boot time still goes to 10s of milliseconds. Might take a couple years, but interactivity doesnt need to wait on ram to be filled.
- the8472 3y ago> No matter what, loading up 2+ GB of ram will always take noticeable time. Barely so. NVMe sequential throughput is measured in gigabytes per second. So you can get this under 300ms. And you can optimize the order in which things are loaded so that the important ones arrive first, not all in-memory data is hot. What makes booting take time are serial dependencies between boot stages, timers (boot prompts for humans, but also for hardware to power up), careful device enumeration and initialization and stuff like that.
- hwillis 3y agoYep. Keep it all hot. North/southbridge, controllers, everything. Skip POST. If something has changed we can just restart once it's warmed up. Anything that still needs a traditional boot (eg a disk drive) we just be assumed to have not changed until proven otherwise. Fuck the MBR. Fuck ROM and BIOS and CMOS. If you don't need to do it between RAM frames, you don't need to do it until you're told to reboot. If you've been unpowered all day, or if your hardware has changed, or you're worried about security, then you can choose boot from scratch. The only other reason, IMO, is because the computer has just been put together. If all those parts can restore their previous configuration, all they have to do is signal "yep, I'm still in the same configuration" and we should be able to pick up where we left off (again, except for disk drives/ram/networking etc).
- the8472 3y agoI like the clean slate we get from boot-from-scratch. Some pieces of hardware have subtle state corruption issues that can accumulate over uptime (kinda like Windows) that get flushed out by a reinitialization. Instead as much as possible of the boot process should be taken off the critical path and be treated more like hotplug/optional peripherals. Those HDDs? They can spin up while I'm already logged in (assuming they're not the boot drive).
- imtringued 3y agoWatch this fade into obscurity the same as Intel's 3D X point. The world is not ready for the diseconomies of scale of a second memory type. DRAM and SSD fabs are struggling so why shouldn't they? Goodbye promising technology!
- rmbyrro 3y agoIt doesn't need to have consumer-wide adoption to be a success. They can cater to a niche business market to which UltraRAM can add ultra-high value (pun intended) for particular data processing or persistence needs. One idea that comes to my mind is stock markets. Automated traders took over it and their fight in on the sub-milisecond scale. Imagine how much an investment bank would pay for UltraRAM if it allows them to process real time data much faster and make ultra-money with it? (again, intended and not sorry about that!)
- cultureswitch 3y agoCloser to home, I can think of a few competitive video game players with more money than sense who would spend in the thousands for a DRAM replacement that allows to go from 150FPS to 300FPS. Depending on workload, DRAM latency generally ends up being the bottleneck at such high refresh rates.
- m_eiman 3y agoAssuming it can be as dense physically as current flash and RAM, there is a pretty nice market to target in mobile devices that's always looking for things that can lower battery use. Conveniently that's also a market where Apple and Google have enough control over the software side to make things work with a new, weird memory scheme (RAM slower than permanent storage, but still needed because of durability).
- ilaksh 3y agoLLMs/multimodal large models are looking for something like this. They will easily absorb the gains.
- nagisa 3y ago
- austin-cheney 3y agoDeleted.
- actionfromafar 3y agoI don’t understand how any of that follows. Databases are as much about locking and data structures as about persistence.
- austin-cheney 3y agoDeleted.
- rewmie 3y ago> Databases are a means to query and index data with greater performance than without. I don't think you understand your own point. The querying, indexing, and performance bit are tied to the data structures used internally by the database, not the technology used to persist data.
- c0balt 3y agoWell, that's one hell of an undersell of what a database like PostgreSQL, MSSQL or MongoDB does. It's not just that people "can't write priginal applications" but that in fact people shouldn't always write their own bespoke single-purpose databases for each application. Getting ACID, MVCC, efficient storage, indexing and backups etc. at the same time is hard, really damn hard. You might get over some of them, e.g., efficient storage, with hardware but there's no free lunch on those topics. A database is like using a library: You can always write it from scratch (and sometimes you should even) but in 99% percent of cases you should rely on the tried, battle tested existing solution.
- nivertech 3y agoLocking and data structures are more or less a solved problem. Persistence is not yet solved. Our programming models are currently heavily influenced by the way we store and query data and the underlying registers/memory/cache/storage HW. With PRAM, we can simplify programming models using Persistence Ignorance (PI). https://deviq.com/principles/persistence-ignorance https://deviq.com/principles/persistence-ignorance
- JonChesterfield 3y agoArticle claims a tenth the latency of dram at 100x lower power, but also says they're trying to fabricate at 20nm. Oh, and also persistent. If they've done that, awesome. Make it, show that it works, licence how to make the thing to semiconductor companies and retire wealthy. Or maybe the university owns the IP.
- tuatoru 3y ago1/100 power, 1/10 latency... in a through-hole chip carrier?? How do they get enough of it close enough to the CPU at those low powers and latencies, at DRAM clocks? Electricity travels 10cm in a tenth of a nanosecond, best case. And it uses quantum... I'll leave it to the experts.
- duskwuff 3y ago> 1/100 power, 1/10 latency... in a through-hole chip carrier?? That's a common package for testing ICs -- notice the array of dies inside and the haphazardly placed bonding wires. It isn't the final form factor.
- alias_neo 3y agoMy understanding, from reading it, is that the through-hole carrier is for demos. I doubt they've actually demonstrated the speed/power claims practically; that's what the new test kit, and potential fab partnerships are for.
- Tuna-Fish 3y agoThey are talking about the speed of the new type of memory cell, not of the physical implementation they have it in. If this actually pans out, it will be worthwhile to stack a lot of it on the same package as the CPU. The reason memory is so far in current systems is mainly that having it closer wouldn't actually meaningfully help, because almost all the latency is reading data from the DRAM array anyway. If they suddenly get an economical new memory type that has an access latency of tenth of what DRAM does, they are going to figure out how to get it close enough that the signal travel will not be a meaningful part of the total latency.
- tromp 3y agoWith durability claims of > 10 million write/erase cycles this is not going to compete with DRAM, which needs to endure trillions of write/erase cycles in its lifetime. Unless they grossly underestimated its durability, a name like UltraFlash would seem more appropriate?!
- arc-in-space 3y agoTrillions of cycles, what? How can that be? Maybe I'm confusing something, but to reach a trillion cycles in, say, a year, would take overwriting all your memory 30 times a millisecond. That doesn't sound right? Or is that trillions of any writes and erases?
- tus666 3y agoLifetime of microeletronics is often quoted at around 30 years. So that's once a millisecond. For a refresh cycle that does not seem extraordinary.
- Etherlord87 3y agoI started to think about flipping a single bit in some process a million times per frame inside some loop, but that could only be done in cache… Still if you only changed the state of the memory once per frame, you would do it in RAM, not in cache. At 1000 FPS (we should consider the worst scenario even if rare) that's 3 hours of playing a game to reach 10 800 000 reads/writes. Now question is what happens if that bit gets damaged, perhaps the memory just disables it as damaged, and uses another bit for this memory address from now on. Perhaps it makes the ultra ram slower over time as more bits (sectors) get damaged?
- Cort3z 3y agoDDR ram is refreshed every 64ms (varies by DDR generation and specific chips). Branch Education has an excellent video on this named "How does computer memory work?"[1]. It would still take an exceedingly long time to reach a trillion, but it's still pretty frequent. [1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J7X7aZvMXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J7X7aZvMXQ)
- hulitu 3y ago> the company claims it has at least 4,000X more endurance than NAND and can store data for 1,000+ years. I'm sure the company has some tests to prove those claims. /s Anyone did a HALT test with the M-DISC ?
- rvnx 3y agoI come from the future and I can tell you that the 1’000 years were greatly exaggerated, as the UltraRAM doesn’t handle well radiations fallout from World War III. P.S.: we switched to the metric system.
- akerr 3y agoMetric will finally overthrow our imperial overlords! Sorry to hear about the war - I assume these were related?
- elzbardico 3y agoI also come from the future, and the reason for the war was to finally get rid of the imperial system. Despite billions of people having died, we all think it was worth.
- sleepybrett 3y agoP.P.S.: Going metric was the reason for ww3
- IanCal 3y agoYou can disagree with the tests or interpretation but it's easy to find the paper rather than just assuming no testing. Endurance figures come from actual testing with their 20um version. Retention is based on looking at the decay over 14h. Since it decays to begin with then plateaus they look at fitting a line to it from some time before the plateau (otherwise the answer is "infinite years") which gives 10^7 hours. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/aelm.202101103 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/aelm.202101...
- DoctorOetker 3y ago
- bitwize 3y agoThis sounds too good to be true. When Apple buys up all the production capacity for this and makes it available exclusively in Macs and iPads, we'll know it's viable. Till then, my optimism is tempered with caution.
- caleb-allen 3y agoApple won't do it until they're proven by integrating with existing manufacturers of some kind
- dist-epoch 3y agoApple is too smart for that. If they buy it, they will also sell it separately, just like Samsung manufactures phone screens for Apple.
- amelius 3y agoYeah, they will sell it with a special license so you can't use it in products that compete with iDevices and MacBooks.
- a6 3y agoNot to be confused with the AMD/Xilinx UltraRAM present in their FPGA fabric.
- Ballas 3y agoIt seems they(Xilinx/AMD) might also have applied for a trademark, so I don't know if the name as used here will stick... https://trademarks.justia.com/972/53/ultraram-97253591.html https://trademarks.justia.com/972/53/ultraram-97253591.html
- DoctorOetker 3y agoIf it is a different technology, wikipedia needs to be corrected: > The technology has been integrated into Xilinx's FPGAs and Zynq UltraScale+ family of multiprocessor system-on-chips (MPSoC).[7] Referencing a paper https://www.eejournal.com/chalk_talks/2016033002-xilinx-ultraram/ https://www.eejournal.com/chalk_talks/2016033002-xilinx-ultr... FROM 2016 !
- dist-epoch 3y agoLower latency than RAM and more durable than NAND? Where is the catch? Price? Throughput?
- sipos 3y agoNot being made in a way that is usable in current systems, not having a commercial scale manufacturing process yet, and not being proven for long term use yet.
- hwillis 3y agoCurrently, performance is hypothetical. This and DRAM both work by charging up a little capacitor; this tech uses tunnelling so that the capacitor can be very highly isolated. That's why it doesn't discharge. The smaller the capacitor, the faster it can charge/discharge. This tech has only been tested at sizes ~1000x large than the state of the art, and the speed advantage assumes it scales perfectly with the scaling laws. Reality is never that kind, but it might be mostly that kind. It's still theoretical, though. There might be some manufacturing quirk that makes it not work as well at small sizes. Defects that don't matter now might be huge at that scale. If power requirements creep up, they may kill longevity, which may require them to sacrifice speed... everything has to go right, or it can become a balancing act. Assuming everything goes great, it's still somewhat more complex than DRAM- more layers. It will certainly cost more than conventional RAM, but with ICs in particular it's very hard to know if that will be 10x more or .1% more.
- aidenn0 3y agoIt's going to be very expensive (lower densities than NAND and a somewhat exotic process for making it) and it hasn't been proven at geometries smaller than 20nm; it will only be faster than RAM if it continues to scale.
- sfink 3y ago"in mice." Or rather, the silicon "in mice" equivalent: in a test sample 1000x the scale, with only hopes and wishes that things won't change too much when they scale down. All the cool mice these days are running around with memristor-based brain implants. This will be a huge upgrade for them. They'll be able to spend a small fraction of their usual daily time running in the hamster wheel, charging up their symbiote brains.
- lionkor 3y agoUltra-Random Access Memory? ;) This seems misnamed either way.
- sorenjan 3y agoWill this be used for Harvard architecture where programs are run straight from their storage instead of first being read into RAM? Maybe we can use data stored on this instead of having to stream it from storage to RAM?
- Joel_Mckay 3y agoRebrand the name, as currently it is misleading... However, the technology looks interesting for storage devices if it indeed exceeds SLC Flash specifications. However, after the Violin Systems boondoggle one may find it significantly harder to find growth capital. Good luck =)
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- aidenn0 3y agoSounds expensive. Density similar to SLC flash or DRAM with a rather exotic process.
- wildzzz 3y agoIt would likely be a replacement for applications where low latency and non-volatility are required but size is less important. A microcontroller with a good sized chunk of UltraRAM could allow for a type of Harvard architecture where program code runs right off of where it's stored. You can have the microcontroller shutdown completely and start right back up where it left off with NV memory, just write the registers to memory right before shutdown and load them back on boot. You can have very power efficient devices that never really have an off state because they are always hibernating when they aren't doing anything.
- aidenn0 3y agoIf it's as low-latency as they say, then small microcontrollers could just use it for the register file directly, no?
- M95D 3y agoThis kind of memory would make a cold boot attack a child's play. Also, considering big tech corp. tendency to lockdown stuff, will we need a hack just to do a system reboot?
- stcredzero 3y agoThis kind of memory would make a cold boot attack a child's play. People have been thinking about that for over 5 decades! This is a part of the history of Capabilities.
- M95D 3y agoWhat's "Capabilities"? This term is too general to search for it.
- stcredzero 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability-based_security Just google, “capabilities computer science"
- the8472 3y agoSimilar claims have been made about MRAM, FeRAM and similar devices for many years, hailed as replacement and unification of both storage and DRAM. MRAM isn't completely vaporware, but it's not available at the prices or densities of DRAM. So, will it scale down? Will it be cheap to manufacture?
- KETpXDDzR 3y agoI wonder how long it will take to build up a mass production for this. The hardware needed seems to be very experimental.
- g0xA52A2A 3y agoGreat now I can wait for this and Nantero! /s
- datameta 3y agoThis would be best used as cache for standard flash or as a faster swap space for RAM. I don't think this is a replacement for either.
- peter_d_sherman 3y ago>"Moreover, the UltraRAM researchers asserted that the new memory tech is expected to be capable of 1ns write operations, which is about 10x faster than DRAM." That'll be really nice if they can get it into production...