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Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

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Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#91

Post by innguest »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #84
valarauca1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely. Unless we start making file systems different.

Spectators may want to archive this HN thread for posterity, because I suspect nacnud will have the last laugh. (Nacnud's comment is currently sitting at about -3 points.) It's unlikely that future technological advancements will give malware authors more tools to work with? That seems unlikely, if history is any indication. Imagine when you have 1TB of non-volatile storage which operates at speeds close to those we…

Also let's not forget HP said it's possible that memristors will also perform computation, which melds RAM, HDD and CPU into one and makes for a potentially wilder environment for viruses.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#93

Post by mafuyu »

pjc50 wrote: post #44
petercooper wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memristors (long promised and still not quite here) also bring together the ideas of long-term and short-term memory into one and, in future incarnations, even promise to bring computation and storage together.

You can get that today with FRAM, although not at high density. TI do microcontroller eval boards with built in FRAM; you can have your device resume automatically from power loss with all its memory still there.

The problem with FRAM is that it wears very quickly. That's why it hasn't seen wider use.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#94

Post by sliverstorm »

icebraining wrote: post #68
diydsp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it would be very cool to have the entire operating system in SSD. Literally flick the computer on and it's running ;) Or flick rapidly between Linux and Windows. That makes me think it might be wise to have a manager to do this. E.g. leave the disks accessible between three+ operating systems.

Yes it would be very cool to have the entire operating system in SSD. Literally flick the computer on and it's running ;) Isn't that what you already get with suspension to memory (S3)? At least on my Debian laptop, it's ready before the lid is fully up.

Right, except:

- S3 uses battery power (albeit not much)

- NVM provides protection from power faults in datacenters

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#95

Post by imanaccount247 »

anonova wrote: post #42
imanaccount247 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it is 20,000 times slower than RAM.

But still faster than swapping to disk. You would also benefit from the increased throughput.

That doesn't make any sense. If it just showed up as RAM your system would be so slow it would be unusable. There is no benefit to that. Using this requires a supported motherboard specifically because you do not want it to be used as RAM.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#96

Post by micampe »

Xylakant wrote: post #61
tormeh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit pedantic, though. The unavoidable tradeoffs are a pretty small part of the total that we're dealing with now.

L1 Cache is an order of magnitude faster than L2 cache and that's still all on the same chip. That's not "a pretty small part". Energy consumption, heat dissipation, all of this becomes a larger problem for smaller structures. It's just easier and less error prone to build larger structures, yields are higher, so costs are lower for larger structures. I'm certain the tradeoffs will change, but it's all limited by som…

I don’t disagree with you one bit, but I find it funny that you say: “we can't currently break them, so tradeoffs will always exist.” :)

(That “currently” is just a weasel word, but this being the Internet I understand why you put it there)

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#97

Post by aristus »

nine_k wrote: post #92

How come read latency is 150 µs, while write latency is 5µs, 30 times shorter? Do they mean the latency to start a write operation? IIRC, flash memory is written block by block, with a pretty significant time to write one block.

At a guess, they are using MLC (or even TLC) transistor configurations, which effectively packs more bits into on transistor, but is slower to read. Good SLC has read cycles of 20-25 usec.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#98

Post by Xylakant »

micampe wrote: post #96
Xylakant wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

L1 Cache is an order of magnitude faster than L2 cache and that's still all on the same chip. That's not "a pretty small part". Energy consumption, heat dissipation, all of this becomes a larger problem for smaller structures. It's just easier and less error prone to build larger structures, yields are higher, so costs are lower for larger structures. I'm certain the tradeoffs will change, but it's all limited by som…

I don’t disagree with you one bit, but I find it funny that you say: “we can't currently break them, so tradeoffs will always exist.” :) (That “currently” is just a weasel word, but this being the Internet I understand why you put it there)

Well, I can rephrase that "I don't expect fundamental laws of nature to change any time soon." But laws that were assumed to be fundamental have been found to be false in the past, so I don't want to rule that out for the future either.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#99

Post by j_s »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #84
valarauca1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely. Unless we start making file systems different.

Spectators may want to archive this HN thread for posterity, because I suspect nacnud will have the last laugh. (Nacnud's comment is currently sitting at about -3 points.) It's unlikely that future technological advancements will give malware authors more tools to work with? That seems unlikely, if history is any indication. Imagine when you have 1TB of non-volatile storage which operates at speeds close to those we…

I will archive this thread to save this:

  >  1TB of non-volatile storage [...] Most average consumers won't use all of that

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#100

Post by jdcarter »

userbinator wrote: post #79

The capacities are very odd - you'd expect something in a DIMM format to have a power-of-2 size. I think the market for this could be much bigger if it behaved like a regular RAM DIMM, only slower and nonvolatile; it somewhat reminds me of old machines that used magnetic core RAM. This could be useful for laptops, like a zero-power suspend-to-(NV)RAM. The only thing that is worrying is the endurance of the flash - es…

Over-provisioning is normal in enterprise SSD. They use extra capacity for re-packing blocks (i.e. garbage-collecting partially erased blocks) and to account for blocks wearing out from use.
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