Non-Volatile DIMMs To Ship This Year 63
Lucas123 writes "Both Viking and Micron plan to ship cards that combine DRAM and NAND flash on a standard DDR3 DIMM. The cards will have twice as much NAND flash as volatile memory. For example, the non-volatile DIMMs will come in capacities ranging from 4GB of DRAM to 16GB and 8GB of flash to 32GB of flash. Micron also sees its NVDIMM card being used as a storage tier, as cache for RAID systems, system check pointing, full system persistence, data logging, de-duplication and fast access to metadata. Without providing specifics, Viking said the NVDIMM cards will cost roughly a few hundred dollars each, more than a standard DDR3 DIMM module but still inexpensive enough for server and storage admins to consider for boosting application performance."
Re:I don't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)
ummm... power consumption.....duh.
servers are not busy all the time....they idle but need to spin up fast on demand....
Re:I don't get it...DIMM life expectancy reduced (Score:0, Insightful)
Proffits increase because you'll pay more and more often for a defective design. REMEMBER IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
Re:I don't get it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Authorities won't need to freeze RAM sticks anymore to extract encryption keys in memory when seizing servers?
Do not want... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is bad enough that flash is worming its way into hard drives, but memory? True non-volatile memory like MRAM would be interesting, but I don't want unreliable and short-lived garbage like flash soldered together with other components. All this does is ensure that devices will be destined for the landfill that much earlier, but of course that is a "feature". There ought to be laws enacted to prohibit non-replaceable consumables, wether batteries, flash memory, or whatever else.
While on the subject of memory features, ECC should be first on the list.
Re:I don't get it... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think your situation is more complicated than they plan.
If your RAM is non-volatile, why would you write it to flash memory, and then read it back in? You could just leave that data directly in RAM. Aren't you just describing a hibernation process? With non-volatile RAM, the hibernation process (write, powerdown, powerup, read) completely eliminates the write/read steps.
So you mention that the cost of writes is high compared to a low power maintenance state... That's true, but non-volatile RAM means that not only is the write unnecessary, but so is the low power maintenance state.
(I could of course, have completely misread your post, if so, I apologize. It just seemed like you were describing hibernation)