Phew. For a
moment year or so there we reckoned that
amazing FeRAM discovery had been pushed aside and forgotten entirely. Thankfully, Toshiba has picked up the ball and refined the original chainFeRAM architecture by creating a new architecture that prevents cell signal degradation -- which, as you may or may not know, is the usual tradeoff from chip scaling. In essence, this has allowed the company to design the world's highest bandwidth, highest density (128-megabit) non-volatile RAM. Unfortunately, this amazing device -- which should realize read / write speeds of 1.6 gigabytes a second and combine the fast operating characteristics of DRAM with flash memory's ability to retain data while powered off -- is still in prototype form, which probably means we're months (if not years) away from actually seeing a tangible end product hit store shelves.
[Via
AkihabaraNews]
posted Feb 9th 2009 2:58PM
DELICIOUS!!
My bet is on that it is going to be years before we see something like this available to the regular consumer!
A Few years off is fine.
Will allow current SSD drives to have their day in the sun and then be replaced by superior product.
And most consumers wont even know the difference if the industry markets them as a 4th or 5th generation SSD as opposed to a new product.
IMHO, this is no different than PMR in the Hard Drive sector. Most consumers don't know that there was a huge breakthrough in the way the data is stored inside. All they know is 1TB drives are around $100 and you can get them at any store that sells computers.
Except that this would be used as regular memory too one assumes.
You mean the huge breakthrough in PMR that took place in what the 1980s? I mean they didn't start using until a couple years ago but hey.
Another 10 years before we see anything like this for consumers.
how many times can these things be written?
Man I've had this stuff for months. Picked it up in a garage sale. Its not all that.
no no - FeRAM, not warped vinyl records from the early 70s.
"...combine the fast operating characteristics of DRAM with flash memory's ability to retain data while powered off ..."
Instant-on Windows with no compromises!!!!!
Haha, Windows = Compromises
And that is coming from a Windows Admin of over 10 years.
Most people are not Windows admins. They're simply users, and their sole collective purpose is to make your life hell.
Me too, power-user here. I just need the system to boot my applications (After Effects, Lightwave, XSI) and windows do that better than anything else!
No complain here.
If you left windows running for 10 years it would so mess up that it would be unrecognisable.
And it would get slow as hell too making you happy to reboot and wait a minute for that.
You could probably also use this as your main storage device once costs go down.
Which means super fast boot times.
You realize that for your "power off" you could "reboot" windows before shutting off right. Which operating system are you using now that works great after being left on for 10 years straight?
This stuff has been "a year or two away" for 10 years. Don't hold your breath.
months ? what are engadget smoking these days.
130 nano-meter FRAM (or FeRAM if you like) is already available as 4Mbit battery-backed-SRAM replacement - made by Texas Instruments for Ramtron.
FRAM isn't going to replace flash for bulk storage, its too large when the memory size is greater than 1Mbyte. FRAM will replace flash and EEPROM in embedded processors where a modest amount of non volatile memory is needed.
FRAM actually improves with more read/write cycles!
Well from what I gather those koreans fixed its flaws heh, that's the whole point, notice the description of density and speed in this article? doesn't exactly sound like the FeRAM you describe does it?
Umm, Toshiba isn't Korean