Who says scientific breakthroughs never amount to anything? Everspin has followed up on research developed by IBM, TDK and German researchers years back and released the first commercial spin-torque magnotoresistive RAM (ST-MRAM) onto the market. The technology works by taking advantage of electron "spin" to store data in a magnetic, rather than electronic state, providing non-volatile memory that doesn't wear out. The company said the first chips were about 50 times the cost of flash memory by size, but where a typical NAND module can perform about 800 iOPS, ST-MRAM is capable of 400,000 -- making it ideal for SSD caching and other demanding applications. Everspin has started shipping working samples of the 64MB DIMMS in a DDR3 form factor, saying that future versions will scale to gigabyte capacities and faster speeds -- keeping Moore's Law hurtling inexorably forward. Check the PR after the break for the company's spin on it.
Filed under: Peripherals, Storage
Everspin throws first ST-MRAM chips down, launches commercial spin-torque memory era originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Nov 2012 12:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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