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New "PRAM" 30 Times Faster Than Flash
Posted by
kdawson
on Mon Sep 11, 2006 12:29 PM
from the faster-cheaper-longer-lasting dept.
from the faster-cheaper-longer-lasting dept.
hairyfeet writes, "The EETimes describes the new Samsung memory, phase-change RAM, called PRAM. Samsung is dubbing it 'Perfect RAM' because it is thirty times faster than NOR flash, ten times more durable — and cheaper to produce, to boot." 512-Mbit modules should be available sometime in 2008. None of the initial coverage goes much beyond Samsung's press release. At the same time, Samsung also announced a 40-nm, 32-Gbit NAND flash device.
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Intel to Sample Flash-killer PRAM This Year 78 comments
Station writes "Intel's new phase-change memory technology (PRAM) will begin sampling this year. Samsung, IBM, and Hitachi are all working on phase-change memory as a successor to flash as it has a lower (~20ns) read latency than flash (50-90ns). 'Intel says they plan to ship the first PRAM modules as a straight-ahead NOR flash replacement so that they can work the kinks out of the design before trying to move it up the memory hierarchy. The company claims a much higher number of read-write cycles (100 million) than flash, as well as a potential 10 years' worth of data retention. NOR flash is typically used as program storage memory for mobile devices like cell phones, while more durable but slower NAND flash is used for mass storage in devices like the iPod nano.'"
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Advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Advantages (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Phase Change Memory (PCM) is thermally unstable (double edged sword). Durring reflow the temp is high enough to blank the device, so no factory programming. Devices will have to be in-circuit programmed.
Good side: increminating evidence? just place in toaster or other suitable device and set on high. problem solved.
-nB
In this case, format war can only help you. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Flash uses a floating gate, and the electron tunneling effect to program (charging the gate). This requires roughly 9-12 volts, so there is an internal charge pump. To disturb those electrons on the floating gate, while not actively programming, would take well over 10K Gauss, likely in the 100K Gauss range. Don't have a powerful enough magnet to prove anything with, but the 5K Gauss one didn't do squat to a part.
-nB
Errata + Info + Opinion (Score:5, Informative)
2. NAND has traditionally been shunned in many uses because it can usually only be accessed as a block device, and not a standard ROM device. Which makes it unsuitable for many embedded applications. Thus this chip is probably targetted at the thumb drive market.
3. This is exciting stuff! According to the article, PRAM is supposed to have processing speeds similar to RAM, and does not require erasure or sectoring. The only downside is that they don't give any hard figures on what "fast processing speed" means. Depending on what that actually means, we could start seeing machines that are able to instantly hibernate like EROS [wikipedia.org], but without the added step of writing to disk.
4. The 512 MBit (64MB) device may sound small, but I imagine that more than one chip will be chained together to create a larger storage device. Samsung will probably also work to produce larger chips once they have all the early production issues worked out.
5. The CIO article is already slow, so I'll add one tidbit they had. According to CIO, Samsung is considering PRAM to be a good fit for replaceing Flash memory in mobile phones. Considering the lower price, this could be a good fit. The only question is, does it use more or less power during read/write cycles?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Usually it means that the circuitry is layered or "stacked" in a 3D matrix rather than the traditional "flat" 2D matrix. This means that you can cram more parts per square centimeter because your circuits have depth as well as width and length.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Errata + Info + Opinion (Score:4, Funny)
Which of course introduces limitations such as:
1. You can't put one ledge on top of another, which limits specific types of gameplay
2. Non-map opjects are sprites, which don't look so great, and dead bodies tend to rotate on the floor when you're not looking (which is a little unsettling)
On the plus side, you can generate maps using only a single 2D or stacks of 2D blueprints.
Parent
Good (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
(personally I'd be happy with one bong but some people are greedy that way)
Ob. Python (Score:3, Funny)
A pram that is 30 times faster? (Score:3, Funny)
Think of the children!
--
BMO
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The wall street babies get Hummer prams.
This could be confusing for Apple. (Score:2)
"perfect" ? (Score:2)
Sorry to rain on the parade.
Pauly Shore (Score:3, Funny)
system heaps at the wrong parameter.
So l toasted the dated directory,
tweaked the P-RAM...
and reglazed your subroutine.
- Crawl, in "Son In Law" (Pauly Shore)
Re:Pauly Shore (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Overall system performance (Score:2)
Cheaper? (Score:5, Insightful)
2 years, vaporware red flag alert! (Score:3)
FTA:
You decide.
Re:New tech? We still get stuck (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Memory on the other hand is interchangable with other memory, thus subject to a much more fierce competition, which drives prices down.