Everspin Launches Non-Volatile MRAM That's 500 Times Faster Than NAND

MrSeb writes "Alternative memory standards have been kicking around for decades as researchers have struggled to find the hypothetical holy grail — a non-volatile, low-latency, low-cost product that could scale from hard drives to conventional RAM. NAND flash has become the high-speed, non-volatile darling of the storage industry, but if you follow the evolution of the standard, you'll know that NAND is far from perfect. The total number of read/write cycles and data duration if the drive isn't kept powered are both significant problems as process shrinks continue scaling downward. Thus far, this holy grail remains elusive, but a practical MRAM (Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory) solution took a step towards fruition this week. Everspin has announced that it's shipping the first 64Mb ST-MRAM in a DDR3-compatible module. These modules transfer data at DDR3-1600 clock rates, but access latencies are much lower than flash RAM, promising an overall 500x performance increase over conventional NAND."

Re:power

[MozeeToby]

5x more power than NAND

This seems confusing to me, because arguably it's going to use significantly less power than NAND. If I have something to write and it takes NAND 10s at 10w to write it, that's 100J of energy. MRAM would take .02s at 50w, that's 1J of energy. Unless I'm missing something? Seems like they could have quoted that to be both more accurate and show their product in a better light.

Different writing technology

[gotfork]

Everspin previously used the crossed-lines writing technique (shown here http://thefutureofthings.com/upload/image/articles/2006/mram/mram-write.jpg [thefutureofthings.com]), but has now switched to spin-transfer torque based devices. Several other companies are also working on this, so things to improve rapidly. PR release at (http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/14/everspin-throws-first-st-mram-chips-down/)