I hope someone will give a push behind MRAM which seems like a more interesting option imo.
MRAM has similar performance to SRAM, similar density to DRAM but much lower power consumption than DRAM, and is much faster and suffers no degradation over time in comparison to flash memory. It is this combination of features that some suggest makes it the “universal memory”, able to replace SRAM, DRAM, EEPROM, and flash.
There's also FRAM, which has also been around for a while? I have an MSP430 microcontroller where the primary storage is 64kB of FRAM. It's great; performs like SRAM, but is totally persistent, and doesn't wear out.
The largest devices I've seen are 4Mb (512kB), which isn't a lot by PC standards, but is dead handy for embedded.
browses
Oho, they make one which is pin-compatible with SRAM chips!
Price looks like $15 a single part to $12 for ten. Ouch. If we assume that it's about $20 a megabyte in bulk, a gigabyte would cost about $20k. This is, price-wise, equivalent to:
- RAM, in 1996
- Spinning disk, in about 1988
- Flash, in about 1998 (extrapolation, my chart doesn't have nay data before 2004).
I'd like to see a source for the "similar density to DRAM" my understanding is that it's an 8F2 footprint, and scaling it down to small process nodes is still problematic, even with spin-torque transfer.
All that being said, there are people who make the exact same claims about RRAM as you quote for MRAM, which 3d-xpoint appears to be.
Also note that you can buy MRAM parts right now, which are replacements for battery-backed SRAM, and are more radiation resistant than SRAM. Densities are fairly low though.
Where does that come from? From everything I've read is that its structure is fairly analogous to DRAM, "simply" replacing the capacitor with the magnetic tunnel junction, which has its component layers stacked vertically, thus not really taking up any extra space.
> scaling it down to small process nodes is still problematic, even with spin-torque transfer.
yeah, that's the main gist I'm getting too from following the news.
> people who make the exact same claims about RRAM as you quote for MRAM, which 3d-xpoint appears to be.
At least the xpoint incarnation still seems to be slower than DRAM according to that article, while MRAM is being offered as SRAM/battery-backed DRAM drop-in replacement.
> Where does that come from? From everything I've read is that its structure is fairly analogous to DRAM, "simply" replacing the capacitor with the magnetic tunnel junction, which has its component layers stacked vertically, thus not really taking up any extra space.
I did some searching; older references show an 8-12F2 size, for e.g. the Everspin parts. Grandis claims a 6F2 size which is indeed comparable to DRAM.
>> people who make the exact same claims about RRAM as you quote for MRAM, which 3d-xpoint appears to be.
> At least the xpoint incarnation still seems to be slower than DRAM according to that article, while MRAM is being offered as SRAM/battery-backed DRAM drop-in replacement.
Right, the product they are claiming they will manufacture next year is slower than DRAM and less dense than flash. (Frustratingly I couldn't find a reference for if they are talking about latency or throughput when they say "slower"; it makes a big difference for which applications will be hurt by the performance mismatch).
However, there doesn't appear (yet) to be a fundamental reason why resistive ram must always be slower than DRAM, nor a fundamental reason why they couldn't do MLC tricks with it, so you can't say all RRAM will be slower than DRAM and less dense than NAND.
Fair point, perhaps I should have phrased it more as a technology with similar applications. I find it interesting that there are parts available now, albeit made on a 180nm process apparently.
Another point is the fact that mobile Safari wont allow the use of plugins. A wild guess is that ad blockers are the most common plugin that people use, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to add this in the browser itself as an opt-in feature.
I don't really see the difference from using an ad blocker in the form of a plugin, and blocking ads by turning on the feature in the browser itself. Ad blocking is also a feaure built into the latest Firefox release.
One potential weakness is that a declarative rule list controlled by the browser (iOS 9) would be slower to adapt to ever changing approaches use to bypass ad blockers.
Whereas the extension model of AdBlock I presume lets it be more clever.
But on the flip side, the Safari approach would be much more performant than having to execute some JS to enforce blocking.
I don't really get the first point about scale and brand, because the examples you give like email are built on open protocols, so it's the protocol itself that is the brand. I don't need a particular brand of email client to send emails to someone.
Yes, but the choice has to be made to use email rather than Facebook, iMessage, LinkedIn, etc. For some people it's the default, but there is always advertising trying to tempt them away. Email doesn't really have a brand identity.
Note how easily email converges on big email providers too, rather than everyone running their own services. Gmail is definitely a brand. Lo and behold, Gmail is a service that is "free" but paid for by selling analysis of the content of your emails.
Yep, and that used to be idiomatic, years and years ago when people still wrote their own linked lists. I'd be surprised if it isn't still the standard behavior for that data structure.
I doubt that would work well in practice. The reason is that timing is extremely important for this to work, if you're even one sample off you'll here a faint sound, and more than a few then it's quite obvious. So if the sound is generated by a separate OS process, you'll never know exactly when the sound is generated and you will not even have control over exactly when your own sound is played back in relation to the other process, think sub ms accuracy.
But it's only commercial in the sense that it permits commercial use, but it also explicitly leave the creator out of any compensation beyond attribution.
I think it's understood that what is done in public is public, however that is not the same as having the same information recorded, analyzed with facial recognition and machine learning technology and stored for the future.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/22/controversial-...