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Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

venturebeat.com

71–79 of 79 posts

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#71
post #62

" It could also perform its storage functions at 20 times lower power, extending the battery life of devices using it to weeks, months, or years. " no, reducing RAM power 20x does not extend battery life of devices to weeks. Anything with a screen or active antenna will likely not see much of a difference

I used to think the same, but with the new Intel chip, you can now get about 12 hours out of a macbook air.

Where does the extra battery life come from? The CPU? Graphics? Better RAM? Better wifi/BT? Software improvements in the OS and apps to use power more efficiently? Lower power screen?

Battery life is affected by such a multitude of components that it's hard to extrapolate savings in one component to the battery life of the complete device.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#72
post #62

" It could also perform its storage functions at 20 times lower power, extending the battery life of devices using it to weeks, months, or years. " no, reducing RAM power 20x does not extend battery life of devices to weeks. Anything with a screen or active antenna will likely not see much of a difference

I used to think the same, but with the new Intel chip, you can now get about 12 hours out of a macbook air.

The damn beast doesn't even heat up when yes > /dev/null

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#73
post #62

" It could also perform its storage functions at 20 times lower power, extending the battery life of devices using it to weeks, months, or years. " no, reducing RAM power 20x does not extend battery life of devices to weeks. Anything with a screen or active antenna will likely not see much of a difference

I used to think the same, but with the new Intel chip, you can now get about 12 hours out of a macbook air.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the RAM. Processors take a significant chunk of the platform power while RAM in almost all cases does not anymore.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#74
post #67
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 1 TB of RAM you can keep without any compression 3d array 1000m * 1000m * 64m of voxels with 1 voxel being a cube 2 cm * 2 cm * 2 cm. And you can lookup it randomly with negligible latency and do real time raytracing on it. If that won't change games I don't know what can. Besides GPUs will obviously also use this technology if it really works.

this needs to be higher up.. that's awesome to know! ... we might actually be able to emulate the Ps3 on the computer! hah

I don't know what is special about emulating a ps3 on a PC, most mainstream PCs and GPUs are faster than the Power-PC based cell processor in the ps3 (an 8 year old console). Even the ps4 does not contain any better graphics processing capabilities than a recent relatively high end PC.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#75
post #4

> It can access that data 20 times faster than the best breed of flash memory > could also perform its storage functions at 20 times lower power > non-volatile > 10 times the endurance of NAND flash chips that it could replace If this is true, wow, but I have a hard time believing it.

I agree, these claims seem incredible, I would love to see things like this backed up with a demo.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#76
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we're talking about game logic, I agree. If we're talking about rendering beautiful complex worlds with post-processed special effects, I disagree.

I'm a graphics programmer. The only reason to prefer the GPU is because it confers an advantage over the traditional CPU+RAM combination. There's nothing inherently special about a modern GPU. The GPU is a sequence of actions and abilities encoded into hardware, e.g. the ability to automatically perform various kinds of texture filtering transparently to the game developer. Since the GPU is hardware, and since hardwa…

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20130305060258_AMD_...

AMD Kaveri CPU will support GDDR5 apparently. Furthermore, DDR4 is set to appear soon, with significant improvements in bandwidth / latency / power.

So RAM tech may be lagging behind, but by 2014 or 2015, we'll start to see some interesting advances in RAM.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#77
post #26

Given the graphic on the top a chip with 8 GByte at 77mm^2 I have no idea where they're getting the "Terabyte on a chip" thing. Unless the mean a Terabyte on a 200 mm die ?

They probably mean TB for the whole device, and each chip is smaller. This could also be a picture of an earlier model.

Also they're stacking the device 3 dimensionally, so they could be referring to 125 layers of 8gb RRAM, which would spit out the 1TB number.

Re: Crossbar Resistive RAM stores a terabyte on a chip

#79

Does anyone know if there has been progress in volatile memory tech? I'm hoping for 1TB RAM chips with 10x faster access times than current RAM. It will enable PC gaming to deliver unmatched immersive experiences, among other applications.

The thing is at this point a lot of latency comes from the fact that each dimm is physically displaced from the cpu.

When you are on a timescale of nanoseconds even electricity's speed can be slow when being compared to something like intel's l4 cache which is on-die.

For any type of volatile memory that latency will exist until mobo designers move the ram closer to the cpu or adopt optical interfaces between parts.

For some cool calculations that can put things in perspective take the speed of light as 299 792 458 m/s and take the time of a nanosecond as 10^-9 seconds to get ~0.3 m/ns for light. That means that for every third of a meter the dimms are away from the cpu means a constant 1ns delay in terms of latency.

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