I came across the term “Magnetoresistive random-access memory” while researching the other day and read about it on WikiPedia. It is fascinating stuff and seems like it has some potential in the industry but as someone majoring in non-technology oriented field with limited understanding of technical details (only at low and heuristic level), I was having a difficulty understanding about what are some of the practical obstacles that is holding back the technology from directly competing against current RAM technologies. I also read that there is currently a company called Everspin that specializes in MRAM and was wondering what you guys think about the company (the company was spun off from a company named Freescale that was bought by NXP Semiconductors. Apparently Lisa Su the current CEO of AMD worked as CTO at Freescale fro 2007 to 2011)
TLDR:
I am new to the forum and do not have in depth understanding of technology (I am not even sure if this is the perfectly right thread to post this), especially about some of the descriptions of MRAM technology. So my questions are:
What are some of the key characteristics of MRAM from practical user point of view? Advantages, disadvantages, potential conveniences, potential inconveniences, etc.
Why is MRAM not mainstream yet? What are some of the key technological roadblocks?
Is there a future prospect to the technology or would this be irrelevant due to other emerging technologies or superiority of pre-existing ones?
*Excuse my wordings. English is not my first language and I am still improving my English skills.
Thanks and I look forward to hearing back from you guys!
After reading that, I’m thinking ram drives that act some where between being a SSD and a ram disk for machine learning and “big data”. Fast transfer speed mixed with better reliability than flash drives. Just got this mental picture now of some one using it in place of SSD’s with a filesystem on it like btrfs or zfs.
Figured that didn’t come across well, mostly I think it will be to get both the benifits of ram and a hard drive at the same time, you get reliability better than a hard drive and the data would already be in ram so I could see it in some areas being used as both at once.
Going off of your point, to me it seems like that MRAM would be useful for portable and mobile devices since power consumption to performance is extremely important with such devices.
Not so sure about how heavily using magnets for such RAM component would interact with other hardware components though.
Non-volatile memory with speeds comparable (but slightly slower) to SRAM? That’s a huge prospect.
Currently Intel slowly begins to popularize its Optane memory line up (3D XPoint technology). It looks like the MRAM might be to DRAM the same like 3DXPoint to the standard NAND memory.
But I do not expect to use this memory in my workstation very soon. Maybe in a decade or two?
Even if this memory on a mass production will fulfill its expectations. As a general purpose memory used directly by CPU (not a cache, not a SSD - mass storage) it will take time (if its cost will be comparable with DDR). It will first appear as SSD (as it seems it actually already have). To replace DDR memory it would need to be on mass production and already supported by some CPUs (since tendency now is that CPU includes memory controller).
Also in a way, one can say that this 6 decade old technology already had its prime time.
I would not put much attention to that detail. The chip it self must not have interference between particular cells of the memory. So I assume its influence over other chips would be similar to other electronics.