Magnetise your RAM; literally

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Have you ever felt frustrated when you boot up your PC at the time the OS takes to boot up? If yes, then you can start rejoicing, as the solution is just aroung the corner. Although the processing power of the PCs have increased manifold over the past few years, the footprint of the OS has also grown heavier so that it offsets the increase in speed and processing power. I remember some time back when the P-II 350 Mhz PCs were the latest rage with 64MB of RAM, I measured the boot up time of the PC. It took me a whole of 35 seconds. I was running Windows 95 at that time and remember that Windows 95 was a very light weight OS as compared to the biggies of today. Today also when I test the machine booting up time on a P-4 2.4 Ghz, 256 MB RAM machine, it takes more or less the same time.

Although 30 - 35 seconds may not sound a great deal, but when you are in a hurry it seems like eternity, and we are also talking about the applications processing time. The booting up process goes on something like this:

The processor starts up and the BIOS loads and passes control over to the processor

The processor reads the OS and loads the OS into RAM

The OS loads and the control is passed to the user.

This process may not be 100% accurate, but this is what takes place in a nutshell. The major time is taken up when the OS is being loaded into the RAM. The conventional RAM is a volatile one which requires electricity to store data. As soon as the electric power is cut off, the data stored in the RAM is lost.

As opposed to this, the MRAM (Magnetic RAM) uses magnetism to store the data. Magnetism as opposed to electricity, is not lost when power is removed. In fact it does not depend on electric supply at all. This will enable the PCs to run on less power as the requirement to give electric supply to RAMs at all time will not there.

As with all the new technologies, the question of cost comes up. Will this technology be costly. In one word, "No". The manufacturers are claiming that this technology will work at the speed of a SRAM (Synchronous RAM) at the cost of DRAM (Dynamic RAM). Given this fact made up sit up and take notice. IBM is one of the major players who are pushing hard to market this technology. You can expect this technology to hit the market sometime in 2005 as per the manufacturers.

This technology has the potential to change the computing practices forever. Watch out for this.