There are some interesting implications here. An operating system written specifically for such RAM would not need to close programs, or do any of the other crap that makes shutdowns so long. Hibernates are a thing of the past, as killing the power IS effectively hibernation - without the need to read the RAM dump back from the HD, so it really would be instant-on.
Now for the downside, speaking from a Windows viewpoint here. People won't shut programs down, browsers/word processors could be open permanently, to say nothing of the little services and helper programs running concurrently. Right now minor bad coding and memory leaks are usually fixed by a restart, but what happens when restarting leads back to the same leaky state?
Clean code would be paramount, and I think people might be urged to move away from operating systems that lose responsiveness with time (e.g. Windowze) in favor of some variety of Linux. It will be interesting to watch.
That's exactly what goes to the heart of my question.
Why is everyone talking about replacing DRAM? Due to the non-volatility, I thought MRAM was supposed to be a superfast and power efficient replacement for FLASH?!? If you click on MRAM, even the last few articles on Engadget say the same thing --- That MRAM is a Flash memory replacement! WTF?
You make it sound as if restarts will be impossible! There will be options to drop the contents of RAM in the bios/OS/whatever and force a normal restart.
Or just use linux, eh eh? (Joke, don't start throwing out 'if my program was on linux.... blah blah wah wah')
Lets just pray Windows 7 will be something slick. (Haha)
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
"retain memory even after the power supply has been cut off"
So how does this sit with the security and DRM folks? Makes the whole "using compressed air to freeze DDR" trick unnecessary.
There are some interesting implications here. An operating system written specifically for such RAM would not need to close programs, or do any of the other crap that makes shutdowns so long. Hibernates are a thing of the past, as killing the power IS effectively hibernation - without the need to read the RAM dump back from the HD, so it really would be instant-on.
Now for the downside, speaking from a Windows viewpoint here. People won't shut programs down, browsers/word processors could be open permanently, to say nothing of the little services and helper programs running concurrently. Right now minor bad coding and memory leaks are usually fixed by a restart, but what happens when restarting leads back to the same leaky state?
Clean code would be paramount, and I think people might be urged to move away from operating systems that lose responsiveness with time (e.g. Windowze) in favor of some variety of Linux. It will be interesting to watch.
That's exactly what goes to the heart of my question.
Why is everyone talking about replacing DRAM? Due to the non-volatility, I thought MRAM was supposed to be a superfast and power efficient replacement for FLASH?!? If you click on MRAM, even the last few articles on Engadget say the same thing --- That MRAM is a Flash memory replacement! WTF?
You make it sound as if restarts will be impossible! There will be options to drop the contents of RAM in the bios/OS/whatever and force a normal restart.
Or just use linux, eh eh? (Joke, don't start throwing out 'if my program was on linux.... blah blah wah wah')
Lets just pray Windows 7 will be something slick. (Haha)