IBM, Infineon Develop Most Advanced MRAM Technology to Date

Lycos - Business Wire ^ | 10 Jun 2003, 12:00am ET | My Luu - IBM Reiner Schonrock - Infineon

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The Technology just keeps coming!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

OFFICIAL BUMP(TOPIC)LIST

[El Gato]

Sort of sounds like a microminature version of what we used to call "core". Those were little tiny magnetic donuts, with write and sense wires running through them.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I remember those!

I even remeber the IBM 650 with rotating magnetic drum as memory!

[dfwgator]

Back to the future.

[AmericaUnited]

Maybe IBM will want to buy back some drums to refurb LOL!

[Straight Vermonter]

From here.

IBM has just announced that its upcoming Power5 CPU will be a multi-core, multithreaded design. The Power5 should theoretically have four times the performance of the Power4, and IBM claims that the Power5's actual performance will be four times as high as Power4's. Power5 will be manufactured on a .13 micron process, and will debut at 1.5GHz or faster. IBM is claiming that samples of the CPU are performing "exactly as we hoped." As impressive as the Power5 appears, there are many unanswered questions regarding this architecture. For instance, how much cache will it have? One can reasonably assume that it will have a hefty on-chip L2 cache, and may come in a multi-chip module with many megabytes of L3 cache. What will the Instructions Per Clock (IPC) of this chip be? What type of a bus will the Power5 have? How will the Power5 partition its resources amongst all the cores and threads? Will IBM eventually introduce a single core desktop CPU based on Power5, just as the 970 CPU is a modified single-chip Power4? If the Power5 is truly four times as fast as the Power4 on real-world applications, that must mean that IBM found a way to keep all of the cores and threads constantly fed with data and instructions.

[TaxRelief]

Innovation American-style!

[dfwgator]

How many people who worked on the project were Indian and Chinese?

[Gopher Broke]

I love the fact that the #1 technology company in the WORLD is IBM, an AMERICAN company.

Yes, we are in a global economy but in the computer industry, IBM is still the biggest and best!!

[harpseal]

agreed let us hope production is also done in the USA and not China as this technology has definite defense implications. I actually know some of the people in (excuse the spelling in advance) Poughkipsie, NY associated with this joint deveopment effort

[kezekiel]

MRAM could lead to 'instant on' computers, allowing users to turn computers on and off as quickly as a light switch.

YES!!!!

I'm so weary of waiting while my laptop boots XP...

[TaxRelief]

Poughkeepsie.

[Ramius]

This is really interesting stuff.

Really interesting will be coming soon, as the various non-volatile RAM devices become large enough to replace the last remaining moving part in your computer: the hard drive. The flash standard is close, but still too slow. One of these days, though, somebody is going to break into a NV-RAM concept that equals RAM for I/O.

That changes everything.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I was over looking at this:

IBM RS64 III superscalar RISC microprocessor

[Ramius]

Woah...

Porn for nerds. Talk to me, baby.... :-)

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I think that link is to an old document:

Better Link Here:

IBM POWER4 Processor Review

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I can't find anything much on the Power5.

[Ramius]

This one is big fun. Methinks cooling might be a problem.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/pentium416ghzoc/index.html

[Ramius]

My eyes sorta glazed over when I saw something that read: 8MB L2 cache. I don't remember much after that.