MRAM Inches Towards Prime Time 261
levin writes "According to an article over at EETimes, magnetoresistive RAM chips are getting a little more practical. Infineon Technologies released info on a new 16M MRAM component on Tuesday and the read and write cycle times of this chip make it 'competitive with established DRAM.' How long before nonvolatile memory becomes the solution to crash-prone software rather than better programming?"
No Subject (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No Subject (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, slashdot's filters are pretty annoying too. I have to type slower in order to post successfully. Gack.
Re:No Subject (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No Subject (Score:2)
Not that I agree with that viewpoint; just pointing out what I think was meant.
Re:Lazier? (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm... I'm not sure in what world you live, but Slashdot isn't the meeting place for the world's best and most ambitious programmers. *We* are the lazy ones, reading
huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably very long......
There are very little volatile-memory related software bugs.....
HINT: You don't want your ram back in the same corrupt state it was in before the reboot.
Jeroen
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Re:huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure it was just something he added to the article submission to try and sound smart. After all.. it does make sense for a lot of other articles (faster cpus, faster memory, severely high level programming languages, etc etc).
Re:huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
>sound smart
All the more ironic that it had the opposite effect! "Oh, I dunno..just put something about Microsoft...no, bad programming...that's better." "But how does a different type of RAM magically fix errors in program design?" "Shut up! This is my article and I'll write what I like!"
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Yay for core memory coming back! (sort of) *wink*
Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes! (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, are you SURE about that? You should research such statements first, my friend, rather than assuming.
Take a look at this review from last year [anandtech.com] of power supplies by Anandtech.
They ran a six-hour memory test 54 times--and found that with 512MB of RAM, after each six hour test there were an average of four bits that had flipped! That means there is a memory error on a 512MB PC--on average--every 90 minutes!
If that error occurs in a code segment in a driver, you may get a system crash. In a Windows DLL, perhaps some system instability. In an application, perhaps an application crash. If it's in a data segment, your important manuscript may suddenly lose a paragraph or skip a couple pages as a linked list pointer jumps to the wrong spot, or you may find a bunch of junk replacing normal text.
Memory errors are a serious problem that very few people acknowledge. Why people still buy non-ECC RAM is beyond me. (Of course, even with ECC RAM, there are still various places inside the PC where failure can occur--along the various buses for exmaple, which don't all have ECC. So this is only part of the solution.)
More reliable RAM would definitely be a step in the right direction.
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:2)
I was talking about a software bug.
Jeroen
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:2)
And how exactly is one expected to code against this? Again, it's not the *developers* fault that memory returned a different value than was stored there.
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not difficult.
Just add ECC in software [eccpage.com].
I've done this before in some of the software I've written for hospitals and banks; it's been a design requirement for the software to detect when there is a failure, and to correct if possible.
And, yes, failures ARE detected, AND corrected.
The way it works is you divide memory up into blocks (for example, 512 bytes of 1KB). You do this for both your data and code. For each memory block, store the ECC data (usually, in a separate area of memory, so it's non-intrusive to the program design).
A thread runs in the background, often on a second CPU, continuously checking the program's data and code to ensure that the ECC data is valid. When an error is detected, it is logged and corrected if possible.
When modifying data, a flag is set for that memory block that it has been altered; a new ECC value is calculated as soon thereafter as possible. (This is done automatically by setting the CPU to generate an exception when writing to a particular segment. It's a feature built into Intel processors and available through high-level calls in both Windows and Linux.)
I'm sure you remember the Java exploit from a couple of years back, where the security model was bypassed completely by blowing a hairdryer on the RAM until a byte code error was induced in very-carefully-constructed code. Software ECC is the kind of thing you need to do to mitigate those types of attacks.
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:3, Insightful)
The HARDWARE failed and thus its a hardware bug.
(In the power cord example its an operator bug)
Jeroen
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:2)
With 'NO' you imply that me tripping the power cord wasn't a software bug....
Now lets have some fun with the rest of your post:
I'm saying it's a software bug when your code goes blank and stops when it was supposed to make sense and execute.
If the programmer explicitly blanked the RAM it's a bug in the software due to the fault of the programmer. If the user randomly pulls the plug, it's a bug in the software due to the fault of the user.
Just because the user cau
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:2)
But that's beside the point.
The article implied that non-volatile memory was somehow a solution to poorly written software, which is preposterous. You're saying that memory that doesn't fail is a solution to memory that does fail, which goes without saying.
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:2)
I at least don't consider any data too safe before it hits disk anyway. The risk that it gets destroyed due to user error (like me accidentally hitting the wrong key), program bug, failing hardware, power outage, ... is IHMO still larger than the bit flip problem (especially since there's a high probablilty that a bit flip either does a minor error (like changing a single character in a document), or causes a program to crash (if the error is inside program cod
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:5, Interesting)
Due to the design of Dynamic RAM chips, memory bit flip errors are not influenced by how long the memory sits "idle". I emphise idle here because Dynamic ram is never really idle. Each cell in a DRAM chip contains a capacitor and a transistor. If a DRAM cell is left to its own devices, the capacitor soon discarges and the cell looses its state. To stop this from happening, in the background, the RAM controller on the chip is constantly recharging the capacitors. Each cell is read and rewritten about every few milliseconds.
Because DRAM chips are never idle, the whole methodolgy of the anandtech test is WRONG, and the most obvious conclusion is that anandtech is using dodgy ram, or is simply pushing the RAM beyond their specs to forcibly generate errors.
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:5, Informative)
As far as errors not being introduced when the memory is "idle," you're thinking of static RAM. Static RAM doesn't need to be refreshed, and thus actually CAN be idle. So it holds a huge advantage here. Without the refresh cycle, there's no place for errors to be introduced except during the actual reads and writes by the processor.
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:4, Insightful)
Without the refresh cycle, there's no place for errors to be introduced except during the actual reads and writes by the processor.
What about external influences (heat, cosmic radiation, etc)?
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:2)
Re:Memory errors are RAMPANT--one every 90 minutes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:huh? (Score:2)
Re:huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yep and wait till you see how many previously working programs start behaving as buggy as hell with nonvolatile memory, we're going to have to be far more careful about the init state of memory in a instant on world.
Hopefully never. (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, imagine the power savings and lightning fast startup times! I'd love an "instant on" PC! ( or, erm...Mac
Re:Hopefully never. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a daily ritual for me:
Turn on Computer
Walk to kitchen
Make Coffee!
Walk to desk
Log on
I never even see the machine boot up.
Re:Hopefully never. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hopefully never. (Score:2)
Re:Hopefully never. (Score:3, Insightful)
Your hardware upgrade is a daily ritual?
Re:Hopefully never. (Score:3, Insightful)
(soooo offtopic, but I couldn't resist)
Re:Hopefully never. (Score:2)
You can already do this, it's called sleep mode
Re:Hopefully never. (Score:2)
In SLEEP mode? Yes, there is some savings, but power's still going through the RAM. Maybe you want hibernation - suspend/sleep to disk. Just as stable as sleep on Windows (not very), a little harder to do on Linux, but takes a lot less power with a normal shutdown time and a VERY quick boot.
Re:Hopefully never. (Score:2)
Speed of typical single 7200 rpm drive = 50MB/sec.
Assuming the typical naive resume:
RAM = 512MB, resume from disk = 10 seconds.
RAM = 1GB, resume from disk = 20 seconds
RAM = 2GB, resume from disk = 40 seconds.
A non naive resume would involve rapid compresion of the contents of memory and streaming the results to disk + checksum (you'd still have to allocate space for worst case scenario), but I haven't seen anyone do this y
EROS (Score:5, Interesting)
Now one thing Novell is not is stupid. They refused.
Somehow, the story of the challenge got around the exhibition floor, and a crowd assembled. Perhaps it was gremlins. Never eager to pass up an opportunity, the keykos staff happily spent the next hour kicking their plug out of the wall. Each time, the system would come back within 30 seconds (15 of which were spent in the bios prom, which was embarassing, but not really key logic's fault). Each time key logic did this, more of the audience would give novell a dubious look.
Eventually, the novell folks couldn't take it anymore, and gritting their teeth they carefully turned the power off on their machine, hoping that nothing would go wrong. As you might expect, the machine successfully stopped running. Very reliable.
Having successfully stopped their machine, novell crossed their fingers and turned the machine back on. 40 minutes later, they were still checking their file systems. Not a single useful program had been started.
Figuring they probably had made their point, and not wanting to cause undeserved embarassment, the keykos folks stopped pulling the plug after five or six recoveries.
Wouldn't fix crashing programs (Score:5, Insightful)
Looks cool for applications such as hibernate.
I don't follow this statement (Score:5, Interesting)
Someone explain to me how MRAM will help with stability if it is simply replacing the same type of functionality that good old fashioned RAM has.
Re:I don't follow this statement (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonetheless, I don't know whether that particular aspect of MRAM will make any difference. I can't remember the last time I had to reboot Linux due to a software crash! Virtual/protected memory systems are very good about isolating applications from each other already.
The real benefits of MRAM are far more exciting. Unlike conventional DRAM, MRAM does not need to be refreshed (it's nonvolatile), yet its fast enough and could be cheap enough to replace DRAM. The result is a huge POWER SAVINGS since you wouldn't have to use power to run the DRAM refresh cycles. Moreover, MRAM is simpler, so it could have higher integration densities, and thus would be cheaper.
MRAM falls into the general domain of "spintronics" (which is the name given to technologies which exploit the spin of electrons in addition to their charge). One of the most exciting applications of spintronics is in reconfigurable computing. We could make "real" reconfigurable logic -- cheap nonvolatile FPGA's. Your processor could quite literally rewire itself on the fly, adapting to the task at hand. Very exciting.
Re:I don't follow this statement (Score:3, Funny)
But only if we pull the chip out of his head, and set the switch to the learning mode that skynet had turned off.
Sorry had to do it.
Mycroft
Wha? (Score:5, Insightful)
Programmer Error (Score:5, Insightful)
Never. Having the same bits in memory after a reboot doesn't help if you wrote the wrong bits in the first place.
"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
~Lake
Re:Programmer Error (Score:2)
A crash? system reboots and picks up at the last stable point. Finding that stable point could be a bit tricky though... maybe some memory was incorrectly overwritten 5 minutes ago and is only just now causing a crash.
But if a crash causes a system reboot which takes only the blink of an eye and picks up almost exactly
Not a solution (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, an application crashing very seldom causes the machine to actually power down, and an application crashing and being restarted never gets to use the same memory the same way anyway, so the point is entirely moot. If your main memory is nonvolatile RAM, the advantage is you can design a system that can be powered down and suspended without having all that lengthy write of the entire machine's state to disk (and read when it comes back up again), which would be extremely useful on a laptop. If you can do this, you can have essentially uptime of years, so the incentive would be to write MORE stable operating systems and applications if the expectation is that even a laptop may go years between reboots.
Re:Not a solution (Score:2)
Only in your traditional volatile-memory view of the universe. If the machine can power up and continue from exactly where it left off in response to an external stimulus (keypress, network packet, whatever) in a short enough time, you'd never even notice.
Re:Not a solution (Score:2)
You completely missed the point.
If the machine state survives a power cycle though, it's vastly different to if it starts from fresh every power cycle.
If a laptop is used 8 hours in a 24 hour period, and gets powered off 3 times a day, if the state isn't saved, it gets rebooted 3 times a day, starting from a clean state 3 times a day. If, however, state is saved and the machine is never actually rebooted, it can go years without a reboot - tha
What? (Score:4, Informative)
How long before nonvolatile memory becomes the solution to crash-prone software rather than better programming?
What? A crash-prone program is a crash-prone program, regardless of whether it vanishes or not when you turn the power off.
Preserve corruption across power-cycle (Score:3, Insightful)
Good, now I'll be able to preserve memory corruption even after a power-cycle! Last time I checked, software crashes weren't due to the fact that DRAM loses its contents when powered down.
irrelevant to crash-prone software (Score:3, Insightful)
If your operating system has crashed, it has crashed. You need to reboot it. MRAM cannot change that. The point is that with MRAM you should be able to switch off your computer and switch it on again later without reboot and without need to save RAM contents to disk at power-down and to retore them from disk after the system is switched on again.
Hence if anything, this technology will increase pressure on operating system vendors to produce OSes which don't crash badly enough to require a reboot.
Moving parts are soooo 2000 (Score:5, Interesting)
In 20 years, we'll all be looking back at DVD and CDROM like we do at Tape Cassette.
Moving parts and things that go whirr make me cringe.
I just want to plug it in and get instant access.
Re:Moving parts are soooo 2000 (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can live without bloatware like Windows, OS X or KDE/Gnome, it's easy enough to go solid state today. My CF card is bigger than the HD that I used to run Linux 2.0 with X and Fvwm 1.2
Re:Moving parts are soooo 2000 (Score:2)
If you have a 5 GB DVD movie, to replace that with regular RAM would cost you about $1000 or so. That vs a 50 cent pressed DVD. MRAM looks to be about the same price as RAM once the bugs get worked out.
Sure, in 15 years you'll be able to buy 5GB of MRAM for 50 cents, but then our movies will be in 1 terapixel 3D, and will be stored on holographic cubes that hold 50 petabytes for 50 cents. And it will still cos
Re:Moving parts are soooo 2000 (Score:2)
Re:Moving parts are soooo 2000 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Moving parts are soooo 2000 (Score:2)
permanent storage that wasn't a million times slower than anything else in the system.
Yes, it would be great. Have you tried to dd a disk image onto a CF card? They are solid state, yet they have awfully slow writing cycles, compared to good old HDDs.
Re:Moving parts are soooo 2000 (Score:2)
Is there not a limit to the number of times you can write to a CF card? I've heard the figure of a few hundred thousand write cycles tossed around. I don't know if this is on the whole, per memory location, or simply an estimate based on typical usage and expected media lifespan. However, it might come into play depending on how write-inten
What an asinine question. (Score:4, Interesting)
"How long before nonvolatile memory becomes the solution to crash-prone software rather than better programming?"
Hello. What do you think -hard disks- are?
I'll give you 5 seconds to come up with a list of operating system 'features' that have been 'standardized' which really resulted from this 'ideology' about how to not write 'safe' code and just let other parts of the system 'deal with it'
Give up? Okay, I'll give you a few:
1. Swap. Yup, if the program has no idea how much RAM it has or needs, and no idea how to manage it, and the programmer just wants it all
2. "Protected Memory". Yup. Same deal. Let the OS deal with 'bad programming'.
Non-volatile memory has nothing to do with 'protecting from bad programming' and everything to do with writing 'true' persistent state machines... just like these two 'features'.
In summary: If it wasn't for 'bad programming', operating systems wouldn't have anything to do
Flame on.
Re:What an asinine question. (Score:2, Interesting)
Shit, this is problem shared by kids' lemonade stands and database developers worldwide.
The world is construed with constantly changing amounts of units. Ask just about any software engineer how many users use his system and he'll say "Ummm, I don't know."
Is he "stupid" because he doesn't know? No, it's no real working model can predict the future of s
Crash savedty (Score:3, Interesting)
Solution to crash-prone software (Score:2)
I don't see how non-volatile memory will cure crash-prone software. One of the main contributory factors to buggy code is memory leaks. Non-volatile memory would allow the invalid state of memory to be preserved between 'reboots', making defects in code more obvious. If non-volatile memory is adopted, then we'll need higher quality code than we have now.
One step closer... (Score:4, Insightful)
... to the "immediately on" computer. Boot times reduced to next to nothing will be prove to be a giant leap in the usability of computers, I think.
Re:One step closer... (Score:2)
We already have that to a certain extent....I close the lid on my iBook, and without even having it plugged in I can pop open the clamshell the next day, hit a key and after a few seconds I am back in business
Vastly superiour to this windows hibernate crap...and you can even use the feature in linux, you just gotta run it on mac hardware.
Why would it make a programmer lazy (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the most common programming errors is a memory-leak. Can you imagine what would happen if you couln't reboot the Windows machine to clear the memory for another few days?
Non-volatile RAM may be the best excuse yet to switch to something more, ah... tightly coded!
That said, I think that the current memory/disk model of computing is antiquated. Why distinguish memory from disk? Why not treat it all the same?
A HDD is the base storage medium. RAM is a cache of that. L2 cache is a cache of RAM. L1 cache caches L2 cache.
Why the distinction from HDD to memory? Instead of allocating RAM directly, why not follow the *nix philosophy of "everything is a file" and if you want a storage space for some temp values, open a file and write them in.
The memory allocated for a particular process would then appear as a file (perhaps buried somewhere in
Instead of flushing to special swap partitions, the memory files would simply be committed to disk when you run out of RAM. (moved down the cache chain from RAM to disk)
Switching to a fundamentally different type of memory may be the right time to reconsider system architectures and challenge our conventional assumptions of computing, especially since memory leaks can be so severe, even in commercial software!
Somewhat stupid argument (Score:3, Interesting)
Why everyone automatically assumed that memory can't be cleared upon reboot?! WTF???!! What you were smoking today? It's fucking RAM guys! BIOS could clean it for you during reboot. Or operating system could do it before loading itself.
Re:Somewhat stupid argument (Score:3)
Sooo... where's the advantage of NVRAM?
So, we spend years and millions of dollars developing something that we then disable anytime it behaves differently than something widely available?
With a minimum of profanity, PLEASE EXPLAIN TO ME WHY YOU'D WANT NON-VOLATILE RAM if
Re:Somewhat stupid argument (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd want non-volatile ram for instant on-off like my Palm does without fear of loosing memory when battery goes dead. Instant power-on/power-off != reboot.
Re:Somewhat stupid argument (Score:2)
Why does everyone assume every bit of semiconductor/electronics technology has to be for "their PCs"? Hello everyone! Those PC processors are actually in the MINORITY of parts shipped in the overall microprocessor market!
Re:Somewhat stupid argument (Score:2)
You wouldn't. But that's not really the question, is it? The question (or rather, the answer) is that you would have a choice of powering down and emptying memory, or just powering down.
I've decided to omit the "minimum profanity" you've requested, as there's no mention of the desired quantity or measurement listed in your post.
Fast and Low Power (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not why programs crash (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps nonvolatile memory will improve startup times (think super-fast hibernate) but crashes? Not a chance.
Just you wait... (Score:5, Funny)
Wouldn't this actually make the problem much worse (Score:3, Insightful)
At least now, when your Windows crashes, you can reboot your machine, and in extreme cases powercycle it.
However, with such non-volatile RAM, this is a thing of the past: even leaving the machine unpowered for an hour won't erase the crashed program state...
Re:Wouldn't this actually make the problem much wo (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. The kernel's crashed state will be preserved, so you won't be able to reboot cleanly. Some kind of checkpointing (like in database servers) would be useful here: just reboot to the last valid checkpoint. Of course, this requires a lot more WRAM though...
Re:Wouldn't this actually make the problem much wo (Score:3, Informative)
The moment you push the 'reset' button, not only does the system reboot, but the memory is also wiped, after which a non-corrupted copy is loaded from the 'HDD' (or whatever is used for storage).
So in other words, the 'power'-button would be used to power the system down, while the entire state would be preserved (like the hibernate
Re:Wouldn't this actually make the problem much wo (Score:2)
Re:Wouldn't this actually make the problem much wo (Score:2)
Two solutions really, I'm no CS major, but I think they ought to work.
Solution 1: A button on the motherboard (or jumper, or on the front of the case) that clears the memory. I'm not sure what exactly it would want to write. 1's? 0's? 1/2s?
Solution 2: Bootmenu. Even old versions of Windows know when you didnt finish your bootup sequence and give yo
There's nothing new under the sun (Score:5, Funny)
Non-volatile needs better software (Score:3, Insightful)
It is much more disrruptive technology then that (Score:5, Interesting)
It can also make your timepiece battery last
You just need to look at it in a different view then Yet Another Non-PowerCycle-Erasable Storage.
Sensitive data lying around after turn off? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps I'm being too paranoid, but I see some potential for abuse here. Imagine a program that deals with passwords or credit card numbers... They could be still lying around in your non-volatile memory after the machine is switched off.
An intelligent program should then zero out those passwords before freeing memory. Even so, would this kind of storage suffer from the security issue already discussed here [slashdot.org] and here [slashdot.org] (ability to retrieve data from many previous writes)?
I rarely hear of RAM as the failure (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, our handy ability to shut down and clear out bad programming is a luxury that might become more difficult with the new RAM technology.
This could mean that viruses and other malware could remain even more resistant to removal than before!
Please explain (Score:2)
I dont understand how non-volatile memory would solve the problems of crash prone software. Okay so it might make the problem of recovering lost work after a crash that little bit easier. I fail to see how its going to solve the problem of crashing though.
There'll be uses for this stuff... (Score:4, Interesting)
Using it for RAM would be silly - RAM is supposed to be transient, keeping it around would be a security and stability loss.
Using it for hard disk would be silly - the price per megabyte would be ridiculous unless you're doing stock-market data crunching or some such.
Some uses I can immediately see for it:
- boot the OS, and save a snapshot for an instant reboot
- use it to store persistent caches of binaries, libraries, etc
- use it for filesystem and database journals
- do RAID4 and use it to hold the parity volume
Re:There'll be uses for this stuff... (Score:3, Insightful)
How would it be a stability loss? I just don't see it... all this talk about 'but when you reboot, you'll be in the same state.' No, when you reboot,
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This might actually cause more crashes. (Score:3, Insightful)
What I'm really waiting for... (Score:2)
Re:16M? (Score:5, Insightful)
However it seems to me somthing like this on a hard-drive with a journaling file system properly built to use it, could have some use.
Heck most hard drives today only have 8MB for cache as it is.
Mycroft
Re:16M? (Score:4, Interesting)
What I'd really like to see is memory fast enough to not need clock multipliers on the cpu's, or perhaps a memory controller that spans enough modules to achieve the same effect. Unfortunately the added complexity would probably be a major pita, or require serious re-design of memory sub-systems.
Mycroft
Re:16M? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:16M? (Score:2)
Many of the architechture problems in scaling up RAM sizes were already solved for normal DRAM. So, all they need to fix to catch up is just shrinking the MRAM components. And if the overall technology scales better it could pass DRAM
Re:16M? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:16M? (Score:2)
I think you are missing the point... Static ram and DRAM are both volitle. Kill the power and *poof* data's gone. Compare to Flash memory, power not required. MRAM is the cross of both. Flash type non-volitle and DRAM speed, capacity, price. You won't have to "boot" your machine. No OS loa
Re:16M? (Score:3, Interesting)
How 'bout core? (Score:4, Interesting)
(No, I'm not that old. But I had some friends in college who played around with an old PDP-11/45 we found, which used core.)
Re:16M? (Score:2)
Actually... (Score:2)
However, this is not so useless as you think... modern memory is not installed in single chips (at least not for PC's); modern memory is installed in sticks, which are comprised of many chips. While 2-megabytes is still too small for even a stick to hold much, it's not so far away from practical uses. When we start seeing 64Mbit chips then you'll know it's just aroun
Re:instant on? (Score:2, Interesting)
What about laptops? Or embedded systems? (Score:5, Insightful)
Laptops are the prime example. You don't want it on all the time, when you don't need it. You want to still have some juice in the battery when you do need it. You'll also want it up and running as fast as possible when you do need it.
Dunno about you, but I'd rather just start using it, instead of sitting and watching through 5 minutes of Linux loading everything _and_ the kitchen sink at startup, then loading KDE, then taking ages to start Open Office, etc. If MRAM lets me have it up and ready in 1 second, I'm all for it.
E.g., there are computers in a lot of gadgets. Take my CD-based MP3 player, for example. Whenever I power it up, it takes a couple of seconds to basically boot and read the track list. If all that could stay in MRAM, and have it start playing the millisecond I hit that button, it would be a much more convenient gadget.
And even with regular PCs, you have to understand that some people actually _use_ their PC. They don't just keep them for a retarded "my uptime can beat yours" contest. And, like any other tool, there are perfectly good reasons to turn it off when you're not using it any more.
If nothing else, for the noise. Now this computer is a lot more silent since I replaced the fans with 12 dBA ones, and got Seagate drives. But all else being equal, I'd still _not_ have an extra source of noise near my bed when I'm trying to sleep.
For a lot of people the electricity bill is a factor too. Yes, it's not a small fortune, but for a lot of people it matters. And it's still paying money for something they don't need. They're getting exactly zero use out of that computer running all night, so why would that be on their electricity bill?
Basically all I'm saying is: next time make sure brains are engaged, before jumping in with the standard knee-jerk "Microsoft sucks" post. Yes, I know. It gives retards the impression of belonging to some big sad community. Makes you sooo cool if you're whining about Microsoft too.
But sometimes it still can't hurt to pull your head out of your ass. There _are_ uses for some stuff (e.g., the MRAM we're talking about here) that aren't a Windows-vs-Linux thing at all. They're just as useful for either.
Of course, that would mean actually thinking and actually doing a real analysis, instead of just reaching for the fashionable dogma. But I'm sure you'll get the hang of that, eventually.
Re:What about laptops? Or embedded systems? (Score:2)
A good example is mobile phones. My Nokia 7610 [nokia.com] takes about 40 seconds from power on to being usable. Similar start up times exist for the SonyEricsson P800 and P900.
Personally, I would pre
Re:lost (Score:2, Funny)