Hopefully Interesting

Previously I've talked about RRAM, and how non-volatile memory is going to come in and cause lots disruption in computing.  The non-volatile part still looks to be happening but it appears I might be wrong about it being RRAM that does it, though, since now samples of the first standard memory sticks of non-volatile RAM are actually being sent out (PDF), and it's not RRAM like I expected. Rather, its MRAM or magnetic RAM.  That stuff has actually been around for a while, I used some back in '08 when I needed a bit of non-volatile memory I could write to very fast but didn't need a large amount of storage.  That last was the reason it wasn't in wide use, though.  MRAM was fast, and low power, and many other wonderful things.  But each individual MRAM cell was also very big, which meant that you couldn't fit very many of them on a chip.  And that meant that on a bit-by-bit basis it was very expensive.  But recently people have figured out a way to m...

For many years, the major limitations of CPU design have been about power. Back in the day, this wasn't much of a problem. Every year transistors got smaller, which meant that you needed less current to flip them from one state to another, which meant that you could flip them more frequently without doing any more (thermodynamic) work than you had done with the last generation of chips. But then something changed. Leakage current reared its ugly head. As transistors became smaller they also became less substantial. Whereas once the trickle of current that would leak through a transistor when it was off would be tiny compared to the stream it would take to shift it from off to on, as transistors became smaller they became more and more permeable. And to make it even worse, shrinking transistors meant that even if overall power usage remained the same, that power was concentrated in a smaller and smaller area. Something had to give, and it did. After the ill-fated Pentium IV...

It seems that there's now something new under the sun in the world of computer memory. Way back in 1971 Leon Chua noticed that there ought to be a 4th type of basic circuit element, which he called the memristor , alongside the traditional resistors, capacitors, and inductors. Then, just a few years ago in 2008, a group from HP was actually able to create one of these things that Chua had dreamed up. I was expecting that someday, maybe by 2018 or so, people would be starting to make things with memristors that were actually usable. I've recently found that I was way too pessimistic, though, and it seems that people have already made cells of resistive RAM, and that once they can be made cheaply in bulk its going to bring huge changes. If everything works out we'll have memory that is just as fast as RAM but which is non-volatile, that is it can continue to store information even when it looses power. For many years computers have had separate memory and storage...

Ah, it seems my original ambitions fell a bit short and its been a year since my first post. Oops. Lets hope I can do better in the future. My thoughts have been turning to energy this last week, mostly due to the Fukushima nuclear power plant problems. I'd briefly considered putting "power plant disaster" there, but the scope of the damage from radiation seems so relatively small that it feels like doing so would trivialize the tsunami. Some back of the envelope calculations make me think that even if you assume a linear no-threshold dosage model for how radiation causes cancer (i.e. the silly conservative assumption) the plant meltdown will end up causing some tens of cancers. I'm generally a supporter of nuclear energy. Its a lot better than, say, coal which in the US kills tens of coal miners each year, and over ten thousand people through pollution. Its certainly possible to do better than that, but its possible to make nuclear plants much safer as well. ...