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Discovery of a 'holy grail' with the invention of universal computer memory
[An] electronic memory device -- described in research published in Scientific Reports -- promises to transform daily life with its ultra-low energy consumption. [...] The device is the realisation of the search for a "Universal Memory" which has preoccupied scientists and engineers for decades.
Physics Professor Manus Hayne of Lancaster University said: "Universal Memory, which has robustly stored data that is easily changed, is widely considered to be unfeasible, or even impossible, but this device demonstrates its contradictory properties."
A US patent has been awarded for the electronic memory device with another patent pending, while several companies have expressed an interest or are actively involved in the research.
The inventors of the device used quantum mechanics to solve the dilemma of choosing between stable, long-term data storage and low-energy writing and erasing. The device could replace the $100bn market for Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), which is the 'working memory' of computers, as well as the long-term memory in flash drives.
[...] Professor Hayne said: "The ideal is to combine the advantages of both without their drawbacks, and this is what we have demonstrated. Our device has an intrinsic data storage time that is predicted to exceed the age of the Universe, yet it can record or delete data using 100 times less energy than DRAM."
Room-temperature Operation of Low-voltage, Non-volatile, Compound-semiconductor Memory Cells (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-45370-1) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @11:28PM (1 child)
Having the best of both as a single form of storage would invite research into radical design changes to the OS.
Yeah we would have to segment our memory into two spaces. Storage and usage. We could do that today if we really wanted to. 64bits is a huge memory space. I have not looked too deeply but I suspect nvme does it.
Now thinking about how those kinds of language features work now, and in such a new type of OS, it would make every possible Undo change of any document become cheap,
Space limitations are still in play. Journal filesystems are fairly common. You can turn this feature on windows today if you want. You are thinking something like this would have unlimited space. We are not there yet.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday June 21 2019, @03:35PM
No, I'm not thinking it magically has unlimited space. I'm thinking that some things can be done more efficiently and differently.
Maybe to state it a bit differently, I'm thinking that "files" are the in-memory representation of things as they are used by the applications that work on them once loaded into the application. There is no "on disk" format. Or more properly "serialized" format of the document -- except for transfer between machines, or for external out-of-the-live-memory backup.
No journaling file system. Just the illusion of a file system. Folders and "files". But files are really documents within their running application, in some sense.
This is just thinking out loud. It's not as though I have some fully baked rethinking of the OS. But I have thought about this before. What happens if memory and disk were one and the same thing.
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.