Intel Previews Potential Replacement for Flash Memory 131
GeeksAreSexy writes "Eweek has an article up about the invention of a new kind of nonvolatile memory technology that could one day replace traditional flash memory. Unlike traditional flash memory, chips using this new technology will be able to execute code with performance, and sustain millions of read/write cycles without dying." From the article: "This is a case in which 'Necessity is the mother of invention' is very true. We were forced to look for something else, completely different. That's why we decided to invest in PCM ... There are definitely limits to what you can do with our current flash methodology. There needs to be a complete quantum leap somewhere along the line to push everything forward. We believe PCM are going to be that quantum leap."
Damn... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Damn... (Score:4, Funny)
The only thing I thought was "Shit, I'm going need yet another blocker for my browser!"
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Oh well, back to Gnash.
And this is NEW? (Score:2, Informative)
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Impossible for three reasons:
You're welcome.
Re:And this is NEW? (Score:4, Informative)
While the whole thing is a little more complicated. Ovshinsky [wikipedia.org] was the first one to get patent on this area, and he opened a company named Ovonics [ovonic.com]. Then Ovonics created a company named Ovonyx [ovonyx.com] with a cofounder of Micron. Ovonyx is focused on the Phase Change RAM [wikipedia.org] while Ovonics keeps working on things like Fuel cell, Solar cell, batteries...
Gordon Moore of Intel was also one of the early researchers on the area of Phasse Change RAM. In 2000, Intel invested some big money into Ovonyx and get the license of Phase Change RAM from Ovonyx. Samsung licensed the Phase Change RAM from Ovonyx later.
Another one already? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Nirvana (Score:3, Funny)
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Quantum Leap (Score:5, Funny)
Hardly news then, right?
Re:Quantum Leap (Score:5, Funny)
that kind of leap...
Little Did They Suspect... (Score:3, Funny)
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In my Calc II class in college we had a couple TA's. One was there to help students and the other was there to grade papers. They butted heads a lot becuase the TA that helped the students did it in a way that pissed off the grader (didn't show enough work or something like that on the homework). Well, I'd frequently get knocked off a few points because I didn't show a step here and there (usually nitpicky stuff like
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Almost correct, a Quantum Leap may take you anywhere,
like through walls, to unprecedented performances.
Though in the future when we know the results of this
invention and the probability distribution breaks down
it may well show that the quantum leap was a big leap
backwards or nowhere at all.
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However, anyone using the phrase "evolutionary quantum leap" [google.com] should, of course, be shot.
Similar to CD-RW? (Score:2, Insightful)
PCM chips use the same material, chalcogenide, that's used inside to store data in a rewritable optical discs.
For a system designed to "sustain millions of read/write cycles", this seems a bit strange -- last I heard, CD-RW disks were limited to a few hundred rewrites, never mind millions.
Re:Similar to CD-RW? (Score:5, Insightful)
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This sounds exactly like the phase change in CD-RW, albeit done in smaller scale
Re:Similar to CD-RW? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that one is changed with a laser and the other is done electrically?
The laser is probably more powerful than it needs to be because it needs to pass through a (relatively) dirty lens, several mm of air, and a layer of plastic before altering the material. in order to do this reliably, they overpower the laser so that it can achieve the effect. The tradeoff is that the excess power wears the material out faster.
Now the material is integrated into a chip and uses simple thermal conduction instead of radiation to achieve the effect. The distances are much smaller and the environment is much more controlled, which means that you do not need to overpower the devices. This results in reduced wear, which means a longer life.
As the GPP said...
"It is almost as if it is more important the way the material is used".
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This is what I meant when I said the process is tweaked to be much better. But the difference is just a matter of degree. It's hard to imagine that you can take something that wears out after 100
Re:Similar to CD-RW? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Similar to CD-RW? (Score:4, Informative)
Ummmm.....No. Beach sand is mostly silicon dioxide, whereas computer chips are fabricated starting from wafers of very pure silicon.
Diamond (pure carbon) and carbon dioxide don't have similar properites either.
Sorry to get pedantic, but I'm a materials scientist, and it really pisses me off when people get these things mixed up. It is even worse when people confuse silicon (the base material for computer chips) with silicone (a polymer material used in caulking and breast implants).
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Does that explain why this idiot [kevinwarwick.org] is always having computers implanted into his flesh?
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The useful part of a CPU is mostly SiO2 with some metal and polycrystaline silicon and a small amount of doped single crystal silicon.
Now adays many of the SiO2 in those fancy CPUs has been replaced by SiLK and maybe MMSQ. SiLK is cross linked organic stuff, the real structure has not been revealed yet. MMSQ, IMHO, is a kind of silicone.
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OK, I'll give you a big chunk of quartz (SiO2), and you make a transitor out of it.
There are a lot of materials that go into a computer chip, and SiO2 plays an important role (mostly as a gate dielectric), though as you say, other materials have started to be substituted in. But to say that SiO2 is the useful part? You can't make a transistor out of SiO2 only, it doesn't conduct electricity.
Take a look at the MOSFET illustrated here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Lateral_mosfet. svg [wikipedia.org]. The oxide
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Electrically at least high-k gate diectric is supposed to be better. I think this is largely because it allows better gate control of the channel without having to make the gate diectric so thin that electrons "tunnel" through it - i.e make quantum leaps across the gate barrier :). E.g. here
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And yet that pure silicon came from... I dunno... silicon dioxide, maybe?
If you're a materials scientist, you should know better than to think polySi exists in any usable quantities in nature, and you should know that the doped polySi used in wafer production comes originally from reduction of Si02 by burning with a carbon fuel (like wood) at very high temperatures.
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Steel is made by reduction of iron ore, but that doesn't make steel and iron ore the same material.
And anyway, the polysilicon made from the reduction of SiO2 (quartz) still needs to be purified by zone refining before it can be used in the manufacture of computer chips. Then single crystals of silicon are usually grown using the Czochralski method and sliced into wafers. So beach sand is quite few processing steps away from the
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Silicon is to SIicon Dioxide as Hydrogen is to Water.
Frankly, I have a few doubts myself about anything that uses any part of the technology associated with CDR or CDRW. One hopes the technology works a LOT better when it is integrated onto a chip.
I'd also point out that maybe 15% of these magic new technology announcements ever make it into
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Deployment conflict? (Score:1)
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It will have zero impact on computer users.
Engineers designing with these parts will have to implement some kind of controller that sits on either the processor's local bus or a mezzanine bus, and even
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Next Quantum leap (Score:1)
(sigh) So many empty promises.
Well I heard... (Score:2, Funny)
When reading the headline... (Score:2)
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For one thing it actually isn't your mistake. There a difference between Flash and flash. It's an error in the headline.
a quantum leap is the SMALLest possible leap!!! (Score:2)
pretty please?
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Besides which, the "original" quantum leap isn't "the smallest possible leap", it's a movement of a particle that should be impossible - iirc, it's either when a particle moves from point A to point B without passing through the intervening space, or when it crosses a potential barrier that (classically speaking) it's impossible for it to cross.
The idea being not that it's a giant leap forward, but t
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Well I'm no physicist, but that doesn't sound right to me. Isn't a change from one quantum to another specifically a step in energy level? For example, a laser excites particles (electrons?) from one energy level to a higher one, then they emit photons when they return to the lower energy state. This is a quantum change because it's a discontinuous step directly from one e
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A quantum leap does not mean "the smallest possible leap"; it just so happens it is the smallest possible leap. However, it means a jump from one discrete energy level to another, without passing through anything in between.
To me, that makes "a quantum leap in technology" a perfectly resonable metaphor. Albeit completely overused by marketing droids.
The discovery of quantum theory... (Score:2)
...was certainly a "quantum leap", not a small step. I don't know the etymology of the phrase, but I always thought it had something to do with the revolutionary transition from classical to modern physics, and all the resulting technology that stemmed from that. I could be wrong of course, or right. I won't know until I measure.
Quantum != Small (Score:1)
Quantum is used in quantum mechanics because classical chemistry said that electron energies (for example) scale continuously, but experimental work shows that there are discrete energy jumps, i.e. there are fractional energy levels that are not phycically possible for a given system. The language itself doesn't care that this happens on the Angstrom level or the kilometer level. A "quantum leap"
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Headline Changed (Score:3, Informative)
Like many people here, I too saw the headline and thought some replacement for macromedia flash was on its way...
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The word you used implies that something sneaky was going on when in fact the headline change was a simple clarification.
*That's* my point, see?
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Marketoid CTO? (Score:1)
Or perhaps he's typical of the slashdot posters who don't understand basic quantum theory. Check wikipedia [wikipedia.org] under the vernacular usage heading.
Personally, I like the phrase "quantum leap" be
PCM? Yawn. (Score:2)
I say, bring back twistor memory and bubble memory. Sure, they worked like crap, but their names were just so much cooler!
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[Checks watch] Yep, it's been twenty years, time to trot that tech out again. Maybe they've figured out how to double-clock it now, so we can get access times down to single-digit milliseconds!
Actually, it's worth noting that NEC got access time for bubble memories down to 16.5ms, roughly a third the speed of disk drives at the time. The only machine I ever used that had bubble memory was a TI 765 portable data terminal. It had 20K, which allowed the user to enter te
Oohh, unified memory... (Score:2)
Millions of read/write cycles... (Score:4, Interesting)
[snip] execute code with performance, and sustain millions of read/write cycles without dying.
Wow! That means that in the worst case, it will last SEVERAL seconds!!!
(Wouldn't it be better to have something like trillions of read/write cycles, so we know it will at least last a few years?)
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All of that to say, we take steps forward to keep from moving backwards.
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If wear-leveling isn't used. Which is rare. Even so, it's a great improvement from the current status with ~100k cycles.
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According to wikipedia:
"most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles" -- the days of 10,000 write-cycle devices are long over.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_memory [wikipedia.org]
Additionally, "Wear Leveling" spreads writes out over the whole of the device, greatly increasing MTBF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling [wikipedia.org]
If
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Of course I would. What I really want is unlimited write cycles. I dislike things that fail even when used according to manufacturer specifications. But with trillions of write cycles, you would have a few years of use, even in the worst case (assuming this new ram is about as fast as dram). With quadrillions of write cycles, it would be very unlikely that the ram w
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Yes, flash does suck on the MTBF metric -- but so do hard drives! It doesn't matter wether flash can handle a billion write cycles or 17 quadrillion -- it only really matters if flash drives have a comperable or bet
This Means Driveless Solid State Computers Soon (Score:1)
SOLID STATE MACINTOSHES?
. . . PCM chips do seem to be the long term replacement for flash memory chips, which is why you are reading this blog at MyMac.com. Apple Computer has a vested interest in INTEL and its advances, and we all know, if only subconsciously, that all computers some day will be driveless solid state devices with no moving parts at all (right?). Therefore, it is just a matter of time, because with the new PCM volatile/soli
A Lot of Potential, But a Long Way to Go (Score:3, Interesting)
I can see a day where this memory is used in place of DRAM and application files are permanently stored in memory even when the system is off.
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watch your metaphors (Score:3, Insightful)
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Wall? (Score:2)
*yawn* (Score:1)
WTF (Score:2)
Quantum Leap? (Score:2)
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Spelling [wikipedia.org] is an element of ortography, not grammar.
So sad when you see the police breaking the law...
Wow (Score:1, Offtopic)
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Wrong kind of Flash... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wrong kind of Flash... (Score:5, Funny)
Not much money, I know. But a 6" Subway vegetarian worth, probably.
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I had forgotten just how awful it really was. It was like a bad parody of itself, without anyone checking to see if it was worthy of being parodied. I'm talking "brillo-pad-to-the-eyeballs-bad". When he dies, Max von Sydow should ask for ball-bearings to be installed on his casket so that he can more easily roll over in
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I figure if something is meant to be a parody or satire that the actors at least throw the audience a bone to let us know they're in on the joke, too. Maybe a wink at the camera, or a doubletake into the lens, jokes told during the final credits, anything to play with the audience would have gone a long way. As it w
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while (i200)
std::cout "I did RTFA, but flash memory is as exciting as concrete pouring." std::endl;