
IBM scientists achieve storage memory breakthrough - interconnector
http://phys.org/news/2016-05-ibm-scientists-storage-memory-breakthrough.html
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bhouston
What ever happened to HP's memresistors? Did that ever get commercialized?

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knightofmars
"HP has abruptly changed course on its 'Machine,' a new type of memory-driven
computer it thinks will radically alter large-scale data processing. When the
company first launched it last year, the plan was to use a new kind of memory
chip called the "memristor," which is as fast as DRAM but can permanently
store data. The problem is that the tech, which HP expected to commercialize
with Hynix in 2013, still isn't ready. Rather than giving up, though, HP has
decided to take it in another direction by using both conventional RAM and
phase change memory."[1]

[1][http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/05/hp-the-machine-no-
memrist...](http://www.engadget.com/2015/06/05/hp-the-machine-no-memristors/)

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dekhn
Anybody who thought the Machine, or HP's ability to deploy memristors, was
reality, I think is sadly mistaken.

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voidz
Care to elaborate?

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zupa-hu
To translate the article, "the tech [..] still isn't ready" means management
thought it would be cool to build memristors but they have no clue how. Some
engineers will be fired. They came up with a new idea, the Machine instead.
They will probably get a bonus.

Surprisingly, promises to invent never seem to materialize. See thegrid.io.

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woodandsteel
What are you talking about? The Grid is on-schedule and doing fine.

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digi_owl
I am guessing the write cycle numbers are pr bit, as unless the USB stick has
crap all wear leveling it can survive way more than 3000 cycles.

Frankly the only documented case i recall is of someone killing a USB stick
was back during the early MB days, when someone mounted it with the sync
option under Linux. This, in combo with it being FAT formated, resulted in the
bits holding the allocation table getting a whole lot of writes.

Without the sync option, the stick would probably have survived for quite some
time as the table would get updated less frequently.

These days you are unlikely to see such a problem unless you are scraping the
bottom of Ebay listings.

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imtringued
An endurance of 1 million write cycles is not a lot when you can do millions
of writes per second.

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astrodust
It depends on what you're writing and where you're putting those writes. Flash
drives survive this level of activity because they intelligently queue up the
writes and don't aggressively re-write cells unless it's necessary.

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chimtim
PCM -- coming soon next year since last 7 years.

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gburdell
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint)

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swang
imagine if ssds didn't actually exist as a consumer product but was just
constantly brought up by large companies as the "next big thing!" that never
actually came out.

i mean intel, and hp all have their own versions and they've been working on
them for years and we've yet to see anything come of it. i'm not holding my
breath for this to actually get released.

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Gibbon1
I've seen a lot of 'looks promising... can't make work or can't make economic'
technologies over the years. Just the nature of the business. I'd hate for
companies to stop trying tho. Technologies that seek to displace another older
technology often have a long road ahead. Because no green field, the economics
and performance has to beat the established technology before anything sees
anything but niche applications.

I think it took ten years for NAND flash to start seriously chewing into the
mass storage market

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agumonkey
IBM is spinning the news a lot lately: here they claim to made a breakthrough
in antiviral protection
[http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49706.wss](http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/49706.wss)
(humans, not computers viruses)

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grillvogel
because they are completely irrelevant in the tech world now they have to
release PR stuff like this that sounds cool to the layman investors

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agumonkey
Typical strategy for old dinosaurs. French post office is now trying to enter
tons of unrelated market. Even Apple watch.

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Quanticles
Here is a paper from 2011 where they claim 7 or 8 bits/cell
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=587322...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5873227)

This research seems to take program/erase cycles into greater account.

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eb0la
This kind of technology could have been great for telcos 10 years ago before
virtualization went mainstream.

Sadly today servers take a long time to boot (up to 6 minutes) making this
ineffective for a baremetal server in that must give five nines uptimes.

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AnonNo15
That looks very similar to Intel's Optane technology which is supposedly
getting released to consumer this year.

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grillvogel
they haven't been laid off yet?

