2y ago

ULTRARAM may be a silly name but it's the holy grail for memory tech and means your PC could hibernate for over 1,000 years

www.pcgamer.com ULTRARAM may be a silly name but it's the holy grail for memory tech and means your PC could hibernate for over 1,000 years

Close your laptop lid and open it 1,000 years later to carry on your Baldur's Gate 3 save as if nothing had happened.

I once speculated to a friend about 15 years ago that eventually solid state storage space would be so fast that it could serve as active memory. I can't wait to tell him.

32 comments

I would appreciate confirmation that chip manufacturers understand humans do not typically require this
- I rarely hibernate my laptop for more than 10 years
  
  Yeah, only once in a decade or so.
- When I die and my laptop gets put into a box and shoved in a dusty corner forgotten for generations I want my descendant to be able to open it in the year 3000 and see all the tabs I had open when I died.
  
  "wow, that's a lot of tabs" - aliens at the under water blue fairy
- Honestly the time you can put your laptop to sleep is the least interesting part, but it's hard the explain the other benefits to regular users
  
  I kind of assumed there must be some other motive at play here, sounds like it was something a tech writer was just fumbling.
- Such retention times are often probabilistic (ie. some percentage of bits have retained their proper value) and an "up to" value, which is negatively influenced by such things as the storage temperature and background radiation.
  In practice, it might be that the only useful retention time is only a small digit number of years.
- Speak for yourself, fellow human. When I go into deep sleep mode, sometimes I forget to set auto wake routine and wake up years later.

But it could also have huge ramifications

It would have to be always active, checking for radiation induced flips, not just powered off.
- It should be fine for normal use cases when used with error correcting codes without any active scrubbing.
  According error rates for ECC RAM (which should be at least by an order of magnitude comparable) of 1 bit error per gigabyte of RAM per 1.8 hours¹, we would assume ~5000 errors in a year. The average likelyhood of hitting an already affected byte is approx. (5000/2)/1e9=2e-6. So that probability * 5000 errors is about a 1.2 percent chance that two errors occur in one byte after a year. It grows exponentially once you start going a past a year. But in total, I would say that standard error correcting codes should be sufficient to catch all errors, even if in hibernation for a whole year.
  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory
- I took this article specifically to mean, and that it was referring to, a new form of non-volatile solid state storage. Active memory is by definition, volatile. This article seems to be talking about non volatile RAM, fast enough to function as active RAM. This alone would redefine what a reboot is.
- My initial thought was that everything would be stored in triplicate, then read in triplicate and 'voted' to the correct value, but I guess even that only extends the time before random bit-flips make the data unreadable. You're probably right on the need for active error checking if there is an intention to store anything long-term in this manner.
  
  TMR (so the tripilicate method) wouldn't be super suitable for this kind of application since it is a bit overkill in terms of redundancy. Just from an information theory perspective, you should only have enough parity suitable for the amount of corruption you are expecting (in this case, not a lot, maybe a handful of bits after a year or two). TMR is optimal for when you are expecting the whole result to be wrong or right, not just corrupted. ECC and periodic scrubbing should be suitable for this. That is what is done by space-grade processors and RAM.
  
  wrapped in gold like a satellite?

Autonomous Ultra Instinct Ram
- AutoNomous Ultra inStinct ram

Now improve cooling architecture and remove the moving parts.
- You mean passive cooling? I thought that had been invented some time ago.
  
  Passive cooling that can keep a GTX 4090 and CPU within operational temps at maximum load? I wish.
- https://youtu.be/YGxTnGEAx3E
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/YGxTnGEAx3E
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

I didn't know there is a flash memory summit. I didn't know they hand out awards at that summit.

The article fails to mention the scale it can be produced at. How big and how expensive is a gig of this stuff?

32 comments