Shit I remember reading about MRAM at least a decade ago. I thought it was going to be the next big thing to advance computers, but it never showed up outside some rare industrial use cases.
The great thing they could do with that is have RAM that keeps its data while powered off. You could possibly turn your PC on and off like a lightswitch, instead of booting up over a number of seconds/minutes. But now that we have NVME SSDs and stuff, we are already getting close to that
Wasn’t SOTRAM the hottest thing around, or is that idea dead again?
So could it be plausible one day to run a RAM-less computer? If persistent memory speed matched DRAM speed, would there still be a benefit to distinguishing RAM from SSD, beyond cost?
The ultimate goal of persistent RAM endeavours is to build all-RAM computers. You have all your storage and RAM in one. Would eliminate most loading and boot times, if just the density was high enough (actually is for some small, embedded devices)
MRAM, FeRAM, and ReRAM all have a limited number of write cycles. It’s certainly possible that the write endurance will be high enough that it doesn’t matter by the time it can replace DRAM in a computer though.
Density would be a factor as well for both cost and device dimension/weight.
Cache is way faster than RAM, but it takes up too much die space and power to be the only volatile memory.
I could see the benefit on a non-phone mobile device. Completely cutting power as a deep sleep without needing a lengthy boot sequence could be nice.
Unless it’s actually “just as fast” as volatile memory (including progress to the latter) and not more expensive, though, it seems like it wouldn’t justify the tradeoffs.
pRAM can actually be faster than DRAM in terms of latency. Main problems are cost, density and power consumption (to varying degrees, depending on the concrete technology)
This is where micron and Intel tried the phase change memory, optane, they could never make it cheap and fast enough to direct replace.
