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back to article US and Japanese chip firms team up on MRAM project

A group of over 20 Japanese and US chip companies are joining forces to develop a way to mass produce new low power memory chips that operate ten times faster than DRAM. Firms including Micron Technology – the world’s number two DRAM producer – Renesas, Hitachi and Tokyo Electron will send experts to Tohoku university to begin …

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  1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    WTF?

    "uses magnetic charges rather than electric charge"

    So they succeeded in separating out magnetic monopoles on a commercial scale?

    Oh really.

    I rather doubt it.

    OTOH if this delivers 10x the speed....

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  2. tentimes

    What about Reads?

    It only says it writes 10x faster.

    Also, what if I swipe magnet nearby, or there is one on the mobo?

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    1. Simon Harris
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Re: What about Reads?

      The chips are faster, they're smaller, they use less power...

      They just forgot to tell you about the 10kg of mu-metal shielding they need!

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  3. JeeBee

    They just need to improve the capacities - 2MB chips aren't useful, even for phones, even if they stack in-package to 16MB. They need to be around 500x more capacious.

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  4. Bronek Kozicki

    what do you mean by "speed"?

    bandwidth or latency? or both? If it's the last, it would have amazing impact on CPU design and competitive landscape. Imagine all this die space freed from level 2 (and 3) cache and speculative execution.

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    1. Simon Harris
      Reply Icon

      Re: what do you mean by "speed"?

      The Everspin website http://www.everspin.com/technology.php says that reads and writes are the same at 35ns.

      Compared to modern RAM, that doesn't seem particularly fast to me, but apparently IBM's experimental versions go down to 2ns.

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  5. John Savard

    Wrong Comparison?

    Looking for information on MRAM, I found that Everson had to exert themselves, by developing ST-MRAM, to get something that would write fast enough to be used as a DDR3 part. It seems MRAM writes faster than Flash, but not yet as fast as DRAM. Still, that could be old news, and the experimental parts the other companies are working with are ten times as fast as DRAM, but now I'm wondering.

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