Researchers Make RAM From a Phase Change We Don't Entirely Understand (arstechnica.com) 104
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: We seem to be on the cusp of a revolution in storage. Various technologies have been demonstrated that have speed approaching that of current RAM chips but can hold on to the memory when the power shuts off -- all without the long-term degradation that flash experiences. Some of these, like phase-change memory and Intel's Optane, have even made it to market. But, so far at least, issues with price and capacity have kept them from widespread adoption. But that hasn't discouraged researchers from continuing to look for the next greatest thing. In this week's edition, a joint NIST-Purdue University team has used a material that can form atomically thin sheets to make a new form of resistance-based memory. This material can be written in nanoseconds and hold on to that memory without power. The memory appears to work via a fundamentally different mechanism from previous resistance-RAM technologies, but there's a small hitch: we're not actually sure how it works. The two mechanisms used to change the resistance have been reported in the journal Nature Materials.
Unexplanium? (Score:5, Funny)
So they switched substrates from unobtanium to unexplanium?
Re: i know how it works (Score:4, Funny)
That form of matter has a name - toilet paper.
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You mean unicornium.
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A savvy engineer would indeed make up BS and buzzwords to explain it rather than confess they don't understand the theory behind it. I'm not condoning such spin, but I've seen similar games advance others' careers.
You: "It stimulates the anti-energy in the transfiguration nodes of the flux capacitor, exciting the isotope-free leptons enough to jump back and forth between the adjacent quantum substrate layers to transfer bits of data on a micro-timed cycle."
PHB: "Excellent! As long as it works and makes me
Re: EM drive has a flaw but the principle is OK. (Score:1)
There is no mass, the difference between matter and light is not mass:
1. Light's has no mass
2. If matter is completely made of the same stuff light is made of, it has no mass either.
Mass and energy are the same thing. Light has energy.
Citation: E=MC^2
Dang, just ordered a new SSD drive (Score:2)
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I know what you mean. I just ordered a new printer and I just returned it.
Just as well! With the new Telefax machines, you can print remotely - all you need is a phone line - you don't even need a Centronics cable! What will they come up with next?
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I know what some of that was.
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That is just way too old.
I know what some of that was.
Don't feel bad: I not only know what ALL of that shit was, I used to USE some of it!
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Bet you're one of those crazy people who think one day we will be able to look at images on our phone to?
Not only look at, but create. I had a Bang&Olufsen phone that had a special matte grey plate covering half the front, which could be written or drawn on with a pencil and cleaned with an eraser. Doodling while on the phone - how's that for creativity!
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No, you should be glad you did it the way you did. The price you paid for that SSD is going to hold you over until this stuff or at least something better than current SSDs reaches the market. If you need hardware now, you need hardware now. It doesn't matter what's coming down the pipeline in five or ten years.
Re:knowing how it works is nice, but not necessary (Score:5, Informative)
There are at least 12 form factors (AT, baby AT, ATX,Micro ATX BTX DTX LPX NLX Micro ATX, Mini-ITX, Nano-ITX, Pico-ITX) thatr I know of, plus numerous proprietary form factors in the SBC segment. The industry came up with those because it was useful to them to do so. Nobody forced them to and nothing stops anyone from coming up with their own form factor or proprietary extensions to existing standards. Those standards and the minimum level of interoperability are a big part of why digital technology saw such an explosion in my lifetime.
Let's look at this from both sides of the purchase: Would you want to buy a Dell tower if you knew that only Dell branded add-ons will work with it? Dell proprietary memory, Dell proprietary video card, Dell proprietary cases, Dell proprietary network cards, Dell proprietary storage and so on. We had just that situation back when I was first learning computers. With rare exceptions, hardware for a Burroughs computer had to come from Burroughs, Philips hardware had to come from Philips and so on. No single OEM aside from maybe IBM, could really achieve economies of scale, all the OEMs R&D was restricted by the need to not infringe on patented good ideas from other outfits. Shit was expensive, shit didn't work all that well, shit was difficult to adapt to user needs and it was hard to make shit talk to other shit reliably. Through sheer size, IBM managed to dominate the market and some of the early desktop standards were explicitly "IBM compatible"
On the manufacturer end, being able to use an existing hardware standard also means they are more likely to be able to use standard software implementations as well. That speeds development time and reduces R&D costs. Why re-invent the network stack, possibly introducing your own failure points, when there is already a very good, exhaustively examined and tested standard? If you make sounds cards (or these days, dedicated sound processors for inclusion in someone else's motherboard) do you really want to have to develop to meet 20 different hardware standards to match every mobo manufacturers proprietary designs, or would you prefer to just develop to the PCI standard and be able to make one device that works for almost everybody?
Finally, proprietary motherboard designs are still alive and well in the industrial/embedded segments and in laptops and other mobile devices. There the form factor is constrained by physical environment and case packaging concerns, not meeting form factor standards. What IS still being develop to standard in those markets is the interfaces. Most notebooks use the same sorts of ram, albeit with a different size and pin count, as desktop machines. They still do standard ethernet, bluetooth and so on. Also, as far as I know, Big Iron (mainframes and other very large scale computing solutions) is still largely proprietary.
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Proprietary-format motherboards do still exist, but they are vanishingly rare compared to how they used to be. Back in the early days of the PC you were super lucky if you could swap motherboards between brands. But then the clones came along and they all used the pattern from either the IBM PC and XT, or the IBM AT, and that began a sea change in the PC industry. It wasn't until ATX, however, that those proprietary motherboards became rare.
Today, it's actually typical for SFF PCs to use a standard-size mot
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Re:knowing how it works is nice, but not necessary (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps especially in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals, there are plenty of products that we see working, but nobody knows exactly how.
Wikipedia has an entire category for just that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Perhaps especially in the field of medicine and pharmaceuticals, there are plenty of products that we see working, but nobody knows exactly how.
Wikipedia has an entire category for just that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In fact, I used to joke that the Physician's Desk Reference (standard Reference book for Pharmaceuticals) could be printed on two sides of a piece of letter-sized paper if they just reduced the phrase "The exact mechanism of this compound is not completely understood." to a single symbol...
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For example the brain works...
Would've been nice if you'd given an example.
Re: knowing how it works is nice, but not necessar (Score:2)
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The last recorded words of the human civilization will be: "Wonder what happens if we push this button?"
We already avoided this fate once. Some of the smartest people in the world worked on creating the atom bomb but even they were a little concerned that the bomb might set off a runaway nuclear chain reaction in the atmosphere on detonation and kill everyone on the planet.
Re:knowing how it works is nice, but not necessary (Score:4, Funny)
The last recorded words of the human civilization will be: "Wonder what happens if we push this button?"
My money's on "hold my beer!"
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The last recorded words of the human civilization will be: "Wonder what happens if we push this button?" ....
We already avoided this fate once.
Once?
9 times the world was at the brink of nuclear war — and pulled back
https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]
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This article was talking about a process that works but those studying the process did not know WHY it worked. When the first atom bomb was detonated the people who built it knew how the bomb was supposed to work in theory but there was still some doubt about other possible outcomes.
"9 times the world was at the brink of nuclear war" It is probably been more than 9 times but there are no unknowns or doubts about the damage a nuclear bomb would produce.
The scariest scenario we face today comes from bioweapon
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Every day we use things that work despite the fact that we, as individuals don't know how or why they work.
What's really scary is the number of medicines which fall into this category.
Heck, we don't even completely understand how aspirin works.
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Every day we use things that work despite the fact that we, as individuals don't know how or why they work.
What's really scary is the number of medicines which fall into this category.
Heck, we don't even completely understand how aspirin works.
See my post on this point:
https://science.slashdot.org/c... [slashdot.org]
Gravity (Score:2)
Every day we use things that work despite the fact that we, as individuals don't know how or why they work.
Every day we rely on gravity and yet nobody knows how that works. We live in a universe that we do not fully understand and possibly never will. Understanding something often helps us to find a way to exploit it to do something useful but, as you said, it is not required.
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You describe a thought experiment in which terrans define space as coordinates from inside space, then identify mass as bending that space to cause gravity; while martians define space by the path of gravity, in which mass doesn't bend space. Then you say that both of these can't be true, thus the terran explanation is impossible.
That's a blatant equivocation fallacy. Your resolution of this fallacy is akin to if I cut a tree branch and call it a meter, and you have an iron bar you call a meter, and th
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But I don't believe in Gravity. Now what???
You better buy some velcro then.
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Generally, we don't care about RAM holding its state beyond a power cycle
This is because our systems are designed with the assumption that RAM is volatile.
If RAM held its value, there would be no need to have a distinction between RAM and "Disk". Computers would boot far faster. Databases would be right on the memory bus, with no need to "sync" to reliable storage. Many, many applications and services could be faster, simpler and more reliable.
honestly, flash degradation hasn't been an issue in RAM modules, since, forever. In flash storage, the degradation hasn't been shown to be much of an issue with MLC let alone SLC drives.
Flash degradation is not a problem because Flash is only used in applications where the degradation won't be a problem. If a Flash re
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If RAM held its value, there would be no need to have a distinction between RAM and "Disk". Computers would boot far faster. Databases would be right on the memory bus, with no need to "sync" to reliable storage. Many, many applications and services could be faster, simpler and more reliable.
The Machine [anl.gov]
IBM i [wikipedia.org]
I'm pretty sure there's a lot more examples of prototypes and concepts, too.
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The Machine
IBM
I'm pretty sure there's a lot more examples of prototypes and concepts, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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IPAQ and other WinCE devices of its generation had nonvolatile storage because flash was expensive at the time. It actually turned out to be a horrible decision because a lot of users lost a lot of data and subsequently lost a lot of confidence in Microsoft. But they also had flash slots because volatile storage only fits the needs of casual users. I had a Sandisk combo WiFi+128MB CF in mine. That left the RAM free for applications, and stored my data where it wouldn't evaporate if the battery drained.
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I think there's a lot of interesting things that a single non-volatile memory space (today's RAM + storage) could do.
The first thing that comes to mind is there's almost no difference between the computer being "on" or "off" -- in theory, powering off is just stopping execution. There's no programs to shut down or information in RAM that needs savings. This could make power management very interesting.
You could also have as many programs "open" at once as you wanted, limited only by the amount of NV stora
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If RAM held its value, there would be no need to have a distinction between RAM and "Disk".
Only if RAM were also as cheap as storage. We still use different kinds of RAM in the same system because even RAM isn't as cheap as RAM, depending on what kinds are involved. There's L1 cache, L2 cache, maybe an L3 cache, system RAM, peripheral cache RAM... and they're all different types of memory, sometimes subtly and sometimes dramatically.
In a world where everything has the same cost, you'd be right. But we don't live in one of those.
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ERAM! (Score:5, Funny)
we're not actually sure how it works.
Call it ERAM aka Emo RAM because "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND ME AT ALL!" ;)
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It's physics so anything that's unknown is called dark so it'll be dark RAM.
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Can I assume the RAM is spherical, mass-less, and stretch-less in the equations?
Let's just use it anyway (Score:2)
What's the worst thing that could possibly happen?
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Technologically advanced does not mean that they will be morally advanced according to our standards of morals. Why would you expect technologically advanced alien civilizations to be morally better than us when technologically advanced civilizations on Earth haven't always been morally better than other civilizations.
Re: Let's just use it anyway (Score:1)
Don't worry, the CEO of humanity will save us.
Purdue (Score:2)
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either that or what is more likely that this is a product of alien student autopsies routinely performed in the basement of the math building
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"What is this? A center for ANTS?!"
Don't Entirely Understand (Score:1)
"Nerds store their data on punched paper tape, made of paper, which we don't entirely understand."
Go ahead and tell me everything you know about trees.
Engineering! (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like regular engineering to me!
"I made something awesome, no idea how it works, but it does - don't touch it! You'll break it!"
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Can't be. All modern systems require NOSMOKE.EXE compatible memory.
Non-volatile RAM may defeat another unexplained... (Score:3)
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But those slow memory leaks, weird data corruption bugs, or software that stops working when it gets into a certain state; will not just magically disappear when you reboot!
Obviously the boot monitor will clear RAM and retry on a boo failure. What you apparently don't know is that existing DRAM is in an indeterminate state when powered up, and it has to be cleared before use anyway.
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What you apparently don't know is that existing DRAM is in an indeterminate state when powered up, and it has to be cleared before use anyway.
Kind of. RAM stays wherever it is at the time; the OS will wipe each allocated page on allocation.
Electrons? (Score:2)
Go Well With Quantum Computing? (Score:3)
We have memories that we don't know how they work, perhaps they will be a good fit for quantum computing where we only probably know what they are going to do.
It works but we don't know why (Score:5, Insightful)
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' Isaac Asimov