Freescale goes to market with magnetic memory

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Actually good memories

In 1966 I had an SDS 910 system with the equivalen to 12K memory (actually, it was 4K of 24 bit words, with parity). Like crewe@, I still have a 4096 bit plane from that system. it is about 4.7 inches square. The memory unit consisted of 25 such planes ant were contained, along with all their driver/sensor transistors, in a bout a one-foot cube. This much smaller than a refrigerator.

True, my complete system was about the size of three refrigerators. This was not due so much to the size of the magnetic core memory, as to the fact that large-scale integration was not yet available. The system, including the CPU, ADCs, DACs, and relay drivers, consited of many thousands of individual transistors, resistors, capacitors, etc.

Another thing to remember about those memories was their speed. It took a lot of time to reverse the magnetic field, even though the cores were no more than a millimeter in size. The cycle time on my system was 8 msec, equivalent to 12.5 kHz.

I think computers were actually more fun in those days -- and programming was quite different because you had to conserve every possible bit and save every possible cycle. Programmers today have more than enough memory and speed for most purposes, so they tend to be sloppy in conserving resources. If the time saved in this respect were utilized to improve security and reduce errors, it wouldn't be so bad.

And I believe that reducing the size of a "core" from a millimeter to a microscopic volume in a chip, and reducing the cycle time from 8 millisec to 35 nanosec, is a very big deal.

Posted by: xokie   Posted on: 07/10/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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