Submitted via IRC for Bytram
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: 2) by Snow on Thursday June 20 2019, @09:29PM (7 children)
I can just throw in a few TB of HDD-RAM and I'm good to go? What would a reboot do?
With this alien tech, can Windows update run in less than an hour?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday June 20 2019, @09:40PM (1 child)
That's the idea. A universal memory would replace DRAM, NAND/HDD, and maybe SRAM. It would be as fast or faster than DRAM, with the density/capacity of NAND. Booting could be nearly instantaneous, unless you run Windows 11.
If you remember HP's "The Machine" from a few years back, that was a hyped concept that would have used memristors as universal memory. That never materialized.
HP starts a memristor-based space program to launch ... THE MACHINE [theregister.co.uk]
RIP HPE's The Machine product, 2014-2016: We hardly knew ye [theregister.co.uk]
Stop trying to make The Machine happen, HPE. It's not going to happen [theregister.co.uk]
This would also be a great replacement for DRAM in the DARPA 3D SoC concept [darpa.mil]. More info on that expected in the next year or two.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Touché) by istartedi on Thursday June 20 2019, @10:27PM
The PC would finally catch up to the C-64.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @09:49PM
No. [superuser.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @01:08AM
When we worked on OS code for this type of memory/storage hybrid (though much slower) a few years back we used a "run in place" approach. Once installed the code ran in place and used dynamic RAM allocation for data. No more moving executable code into memory which made loading applications almost instant.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday June 21 2019, @03:03AM
No, Windows anything will always expand to take up all available resources and your time.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Friday June 21 2019, @07:21AM (1 child)
"What would a reboot do?"
Same as a reboot now - zero the appropriate working memory but not the long term storage so that first-time initialisations occur and no assumptions are made about the state of the machine.
You'd likely end up with a memory split (maybe a moving one) between working RAM and long-term storage, still. But you'd likely be able to "DMA" the file on disk directly rather than having to copy it into working RAM and work on it there. Maybe even copy-on-write so unless you modify it, it just pulls it straight from it's long-term storage position and works on it direct.
You'd still *need* a reboot. Software isn't perfect and sometimes you need to reset. But it'll save a whole lot of hassle.
Upgrading would be interesting though - you'd be able to get more RAM and storage simultaneously, and even do things like "RAID" your RAM if your process is very critical. ECC with knobs on, which may not be a bad idea for a new technology.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday June 21 2019, @11:05PM
Maybe the appropriate comparison should be between software and hardware, not between software and cars.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @09:31PM (7 children)
Exceeds the age of the universe.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 21 2019, @12:00AM (3 children)
Don't be so negative.
You might get it in 10 years : 1KB in a box the size, price, and weight of an old HP scope, with maybe microsecond access time.
"Revolutionary tech" press releases is like magicians : always focus on what they're not telling/showing, and you often quickly find why.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday June 21 2019, @03:07AM (2 children)
And the first releases will require cryogenic cooling.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 21 2019, @11:41AM (1 child)
For what it's worth, they tested this at room temp. Oh wait, I was going to find a quote from the paper but it's in the paper title.
Room-temperature Operation of Low-voltage, Non-volatile, Compound-semiconductor Memory Cells
The extremely low energy needed to read, write, and erase bodes well for its cooling needs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Friday June 21 2019, @01:17PM
It was my attempt at sardonic humor. Many do that- you know, the obviously wrong comment that some might find humorous because there might be truth in it?
The point being based on the so many civilization-changing technologies that news media, even science community, like to sensationalize, such as room-temperature superconductivity, cold-fusion, bubble memory, memristors, and those are just from top-of-head memory, and I'm sure I could search and come up with long lists.
Again, just meant as humor, and very importantly: in the context of the comment I replied to.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Friday June 21 2019, @03:03AM (1 child)
The article quotes someone saying "exceed the age of the universe", yet the actual paper says "Non-volatile data retention of at least 10^4 s", with no reports of tests lasting more than around an hour. Unless I'm experiencing an incredible amount of time dilation, there's a big difference between an hour and the lifetime of the universe...
(Score: 1) by sensei_moreh on Friday June 21 2019, @01:01PM
When I saw the 10^4 sec, I thought, "hmm... about 3 hours." Low-volatility but definitely not non-volatile.
Geology - It's not rocket science; it's rock science
(Score: 2) by AnonTechie on Friday June 21 2019, @10:38AM
Haven't we all heard of "If it's too good to be true, then it probably is."
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @09:35PM
"Write and erase pulses were 1 s in duration, while read pulses were 10 ms."
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Thursday June 20 2019, @09:46PM (5 children)
Existing OSes are organized around having separate durable storage and fast volatile memory.
Having the best of both as a single form of storage would invite research into radical design changes to the OS.
You would no longer have "boot", just merely "rest low power mode".
Maybe you no longer have conventional "files". Still some concept of folders and "files", but a file may now be a data structure instead of an array of bytes. A word processor or spreadsheet "document" may be the actual in memory data structure. It may have a serializable form for transport across systems. But imagine your office suite program taking no time to open documents because documents don't need to be "parsed".
This "file" of data structure is durable across restarts of the OS. Memory and "disk" are now one thing. The overall behavior of the system might seem more like a Palm Pilot once was. There is no "off" state, just resting. (it's not dead, it's resting)
Next I start thinking about languages like Clojure with immutable persistent data structures in memory. No object can be modified, only a new modified object can be created. If I have an array of ten million elements, and I change a[5], then I get an entire new array of ten million elements with the fifth element changed. The old array is still there and holders of references to that old array still see the fifth element unchanged. Yet the performance expectations of changing a[5] are upheld -- eg, you don't experience the delay of copying all ten million elements to a new array. (implementation detail: everything is 32-way b-trees, not really an array underneath. Your new array simply gets a new leg of nodes up to the new root node. Your new array simply has a new root node into a new tree, but the old and new tree structures share the vast majority of their tree structure.)
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, and could always be part of the "file" containing the document. The user could decide to trim the undo history so that it is no longer to undo past 30 days ago, so that a lot of structure gets discarded. Such a thing is easy in memory now with languages like Clojure, but suppose that the memory is also the disk, eg, durable storage.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(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.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @01:10AM
Just run the code in place. Makes a big difference.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @03:38AM (1 child)
Linux has supported a form of this for a very long time. XIP support was added in 2005:
https://lwn.net/Articles/135472/ [lwn.net]
Executables are executed directly from flash and not copied to RAM.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday June 21 2019, @03:36PM
That is part of what I'm thinking of. But also that "files" are the in-memory data structures as an application would use them after "loading" them from disk.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @09:47PM (1 child)
The paper author is guilty of a little unwarranted hype, so it's not all the journalist's fault.
This memory is very very slow and is never going to replace DRAM. With a lot of additional research, it might supplement or eventually replace flash memory. The thing is that it's not really all that hard to produce the necessary voltage to write to flash. My guess is that this doesn't ever amount to anything, but if you don't do the research, you never invent anything new.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 20 2019, @10:13PM
It's just a test, and it looks like it can be made better.
Even if it can't replace DRAM, it could be greatly beneficial if it has better endurance and performance than NAND. If nothing better appears, then it's a future of QLC and OLC NAND for everybody.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday June 21 2019, @12:07AM (5 children)
> intrinsic data storage time that is predicted to exceed the age of the Universe
Well over 95% of the storage is used for redundant and asinine bullshit that should be forgotten within a week.
At least another 4% is obsolete within a decade at most.
Hardly anything from the rest would be worth keeping more than a millenium, and tech changes usually mean that your fancy storage is unreadable anyway.
Great. We now have a tech which could be used to send messages to the other end of the universe, if the low activation doesn't make it excessively sensitive to radiation.
Yippee.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @12:22AM (4 children)
An instruction over in Nicaragua already documents which buttons to push on my computer monitor to reset the visual settings is redundant to the same manual next to me in the US. I'd still prefer a second copy.
asinine bullshit that should be forgotten within a week.
Who considers what to be worthless varies quite a bit. I'm guessing you wouldn't want to be subject to the interests and wills of a random homeless woman in Dehli.
There is anthropological value in obsolete things. Historians love this stuff. As an example, if there were documented proof of Jesus's life and what he did on a daily basis, it'd be "obsolete" but I think there'd be a great deal of interest in that.
Yes, but less than you think. You can still buy Jaz drives, for example, which I imagine that many people don't even know existed. See here. [amazon.com] Actually, I'd challenge you to find five types of storage medium which I cannot find buy a reader for (albeit possibly for a very expensive price).
The obvious exception is if a language outright dies out pre-history, but if literally your language is dead, bigger things have happened than "this disc is no longer readable."
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 21 2019, @12:41AM (3 children)
Somebody does not realize the scale of modern data creation ...
https://www.domo.com/solution/data-never-sleeps-6 [domo.com]
My 4% decade-long category, or 68kB per second per human might have been overly optimistic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 21 2019, @12:59AM (2 children)
That's a lot of porn.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 21 2019, @01:10AM (1 child)
1.7 MB/s = 13.6 Mb/s per person. Everyone can have their own 1080p60 camshow.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 21 2019, @01:27AM
Call me picky or jaded, but I wouldn't want to watch 99.9% of them, even the naked parts.
Comcast would also like to remind you that any "channel" has to fit in 5MB/s, even HD.