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Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

venturebeat.com

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Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#31

Post by redangstrom »

agildehaus wrote: post #29
ars wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price of a chip is more or less the die size. And they clearly show a smaller die than existing technology.

Since when is the price of a chip in any way related to the size of its die?

Price or cost?

The whole premise of taking NAND from 25nm to 19nm (for instance) is to fit more floating gates in the same area. You can take that as a smaller die, or as more bits on a slightly larger die than the previous generation.

Die size is indeed a major factor on cost. For a given technology (litho node + process, e.g. # and type of steps), the cost to process a wafer is fairly constant regardless of die size.

If you shrink a die size, you fit more die on a wafer. Additionally, yield goes up (given an independent manufacturing defect density), and especially for large die, the tessellation around the edges has a major impact.

Indirectly, even testing is related to die size, in that there is a limit to tester parallelism, and more gates means more time and more combinatorial patterns to test, e.g. for stuck-at testing.

There are of course non-linear costs in packaging and package-level testing and elsewhere.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#32

Post by redangstrom »

keerthiko wrote: post #7

That is flipping amazing if true. Also, that "Crossbar Chip Design" graphic made me chuckle. It is nearly meaningless by itself, and is placed so far away from the context it's discussed in, it almost remains that way unless you're trying to connect it.

Let's be cautiously optimistic. Every few years a new memory tech comes along with tons of articles about how it's going to displace the current one in only 2 years. (RRAM has been one of "the new ones" for years.)

I'm not saying it won't happen, but on the journey from idea to millions of units, a test chip is just the beginning, and in the meantime, NAND is moving.

Look at how slowly NAND has replaced rotating magnetic storage: it's been around since the 80's. Decades of iteration have brought it to a place where it's compelling for non-niche use cases.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#35

Post by wging »

kcorbitt wrote: post #9
31reasons wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They haven't mentioned the price or may be I missed it. That may be the important factor.

They also don't compare the read speed (17 MB/s) to existing flash memory. They showcase an amazing write speed, but most applications access data a lot more frequently than they create it.

They do say "It can access that data 20 times faster than the best breed of flash memory" but a rate of 17 MB/s means this is incorrect.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#36

Post by wikiburner »

standel wrote: post #22
Alex3917 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This article makes a lot of extraordinary claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Does it? It just sounds like a normal memristor to me.

Memristor does not seem to be normal neither. Is there any on the market?

No, but they've been expected to be on the market any day now for the past year or two. HP's been doing tons of research and prep work in commercializing them:

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/31/hp-labs-teams-up-with-hyn...

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/07/hp-memristors/

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#37

Post by acqq »

guelo wrote: post #15

According to the wikipedia article on RRAM there are several companies working to bring this tech to market. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistive_random-access_memory

And according to this article, the companies that name their memristor variant as something else do so because of the patents:

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1262578

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#38

Post by ajross »

Alex3917 wrote: post #20
drcode wrote: post #14

This article makes a lot of extraordinary claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In this case, that means a reputable tech reporter from a reputable publication has to say "this is the real deal" before these guys can be taken seriously. (I'm not doubting that they have any tech, it's just that they seem to be promising something with no downsides, which in most cases means a marketing team has…

"This article makes a lot of extraordinary claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Does it? It just sounds like a normal memristor to me.

In the same sense as you might refer to a "normal" quantum computer or "normal" cancer cure, I guess.

The phrasing in the article is a little wishy washy, but it sounds like this company is going to production with a TB-per-IC-density non volatile storage product. If true, that's huge news.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#39

Post by shenberg »

wging wrote: post #35
kcorbitt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also don't compare the read speed (17 MB/s) to existing flash memory. They showcase an amazing write speed, but most applications access data a lot more frequently than they create it.

They do say "It can access that data 20 times faster than the best breed of flash memory" but a rate of 17 MB/s means this is incorrect.

They're probably referring to latency, which is very low (30ns). It still is disingenuous, but that's marketing.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#40

Post by bostik »

wging wrote: post #35
kcorbitt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also don't compare the read speed (17 MB/s) to existing flash memory. They showcase an amazing write speed, but most applications access data a lot more frequently than they create it.

They do say "It can access that data 20 times faster than the best breed of flash memory" but a rate of 17 MB/s means this is incorrect.

Even then the limit is unlikely to come from non-volatile storage itself. The current effective flash R/W speeds are pretty much limited by the controllers.

I remember an article stating that embedded flash controllers typically have a 20MB/s speed limit. This in turn meant that wireless speeds beyond 200Mb/s were mostly worthless, because the devices simply could not utilise any more. If someone can find the article again, I would be delighted.

However: if the reality with RRAM is even half as good as the claims go, then it would certainly encourage the hardware vendors to invest in somewhat better controllers. After all, what good is a new, hyperspeed storage medium if you can't access it any faster than the old one?

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