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Everspin has been selling MRAM components, but is now introducing standalone products:
Magnetoresistive RAM manufacturer Everspin has announced their first MRAM-based storage products and issued two other press releases about recent accomplishments. Until now, Everspin's business model has been to sell discrete MRAM components, but they're introducing a NVMe SSD based on their MRAM. Everspin's MRAM is one of the highest-performing and most durable non-volatile memory technologies on the market today, but its density and capacity falls far short of NAND flash, 3D XPoint, and even DRAM. As a result, use of MRAM has largely been confined to embedded systems and industrial computing that need consistent performance and high reliability, but have very modest capacity requirements. MRAM has also seen some use as a non-volatile cache or configuration memory in some storage array controllers. The new nvNITRO family of MRAM drives is intended to be used as a storage accelerator: a high-IOPS low-latency write cache or transaction log, with performance exceeding that of any single-controller drive based on NAND flash.
Everspin's current generation of spin-torque MRAM has a capacity of 256Mb per die with a DDR3 interface (albeit with very different timings from JEDEC standard for DRAM). The initial nvNITRO products will use 32 or 64 MRAM chips to offer capacities of 1GB or 2GB on a PCIe 3 x8 card. MRAM has high enough endurance that the nvNITRO does not need to perform any wear leveling, which allows for a drastically simpler controller design and means performance does not degrade over time or as the drive is filled up—the nvNITRO does not need any large spare area or overprovisioning. [...] Everspin did not have complete performance specifications available at time of writing, but the numbers they did offer are very impressive: 6µs overall latency for 4kB transfers (compared to 20µs for the Intel SSD DC P3700), and 1.5M IOPS (4kB) at QD32 (compared to 1.2M IOPS read/200k IOPS write for the HGST Ultrastar SN260).
[...] By the end of the year, Everspin will be shipping their next generation 1Gb ST-MRAM with a DDR4 interface, and the nvNITRO will use that to expand to capacities of up to 16GB in the PCIe half-height half-length card form factor, 8GB in 2.5" U.2, and at least 512MB for M.2.
Worse than NAND, 3D XPoint, and DRAM? Who is this for? If it is at a speed tier in between DRAM and XPoint, maybe the larger capacity versions can compete.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday March 09 2017, @06:01PM (1 child)
Ok, this stuff is essentially RAM. I have seen it sold as a drop in replacement for RAM in the 8bit world. You can buy a 28pin PDIP version that is a drop in replacement for an old 8bit SRAM chip, only difference is you can't assume it will be filled with junk on power up. I get that part of their pitch. What I don't get is why you wouldn't just buy battery backed RAM in any use case where the products described here would be considered.
You can put a lot of DDR4 on a half slot along with supercaps and a flash chip. Newegg offers a 128GB DDR4 stick already, 64GB sticks are more reasonable. A 1TB card wouldn't be impractical to build today (don't buy that sort of thing, suspect you can actually buy it off the rack if you know where to look) and while it would be a pricey toy, probably in the ballpark with the stuff described here. Perhaps the MRAM would have enough of a have a power advantage, if you put enough in a rack it might matter to somebody.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sgleysti on Thursday March 09 2017, @06:45PM
Right. And in the 8 bit world, ferroelectric ram has lower power consumption than MRAM, is only a little bit slower, and has a huge number of allowable writes.
Too lazy to research right now: do you have any idea how hardened MRAM/FeRAM are to radiation, high temperature, high magnetic fields, etc. ?
Personally, I would love a USB 2.0 thumb drive with maybe 128MB of low-speed-tier MRAM for the reliability. Bonus points if it has automatic CRC and error recovery in the controller and extended temperature range components.