Random Access Memory has increased in speed significantly over many years, but despite its ability to transfer data at rates orders of magnitude above hard drives, it still has one annoying drawback.
The trouble with RAM is its tendency to forget everything it knows when it's turned off. Turn off a PC and, as most of you well know, the contents of the system's RAM, volatile as it is, is lost. One of the biggest problems with this is that to get the system running again, data needs to be loaded back into RAM from a non-volatile source, which for years now has been the sturdy but comparatively slow hard disk.
Some speedup solutions have been made, such as hibernation, whereby the contents of RAM are written as an image to disk before turn-off. Upon turning the system back on, the image is loaded back into RAM, and the computer carries on as if nothing ever happened. Other solutions involve turning off pretty much everything else in the system except the RAM, keeping its contents refreshed until the system is resumed.
And we've got flash memory making its way into hard drives, to allow a limited amount of data to be stored in higher speed storage than the regular platters of a disk, speeding boot times. But now there's a new technology called MRAM.
Magnetoresistive random-access memory, or MRAM, performs like RAM but behaves like a hard drive. It can be read from and written to quickly, but retains data without power, by virtue of its use of magnetic storage techniques. It still uses power (of course), but only needs it to read or write, not retain.
MRAM's flexible nature means it could replace technologies like regular RAM and even flash components in devices from PCs to mobile phones. Indeed, in an Associated Press article today, Will Strauss, an analyst with research firm Forward Concepts is quoted: "This is the most significant memory introduction in this decade. This is radically new technology. People have been dabbling in this for years, but nobody has been able to make it in volume."
For years we've read about magnetic RAM in magazines, but Freescale, the company behind the new RAM, seem to be the first to actually get it into the form of a viable commercial product. They've been building up stock for two months now, so now have a stockpile of 4Mbit MRAM chips, ready to be bought up.
Watch this space, for there'll no doubt be a lot more news on MRAM in the near future.
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Associated Press article at My Way News (discovered via Digg).
