

Micron puts Phase-Change Memory into production - ChuckMcM
http://investors.micron.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=692563

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ChuckMcM
This, along with HP's memristor technology, are both potential disruptions in
the non-volatile space. Phase-Change Memory (PCM) is faster than flash but
both it and flash have issues with minimum feature size since they depend on
very specific physics to work (heat in the PCM case, electrons in Flash's
case).

A VC asked me if I saw these things disrupting the disk industry, and frankly
I don't. At NetApp they used a term 'near line' to describe their SATA based
filers. The concept was that these things were dense enough and cheap enough
that you could put data that normally would be 'offline' on tape, online on
disks, except with performance limitations (hence nearline rather than
online).

I see these as nearline memory, dense and non-volatile so you don't have to
re-initialize after a power failure, you put data in this stuff that would
otherwise be in memory.

If we could get Intel to support a damn IO MMU such that the 64 bit PCIe space
could bad added into the page tables like RAM is, we could actually make good
progress in systems design. (insert rant about using a disk API to talk to
memory chips here ...)

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rrmm
Samsung had an 8Gb PRAM at ISSCC12, but I haven't heard if it's gone into
production.

Most of the memory manufactures are aiming for cellphones where I guess they
believe they have chance of going against flash even with lower density. The
only other product I've seen with new ram technology is a hybrid SSD
containing some MRAM as cache.

I can't wait for this to get mature enough to get a nice reliable (even if
small) SSD without flash's issues.

