'Memory Pinball' And Other Reasons You Need A Nap

On the surface, sleep may seem like an evolutionary disaster, but its benefits have come to outweigh its potential downsides.

iStockphoto.com On the surface, sleep may seem like an evolutionary disaster, but its benefits have come to outweigh its potential downsides.

iStockphoto.com

We spend about one-third of our lives sleeping, but much of that function remains a mystery. Weekend Edition Sunday is asking some pretty fundamental, yet complicated, questions about why we do it and why we can't seem to get more of it.

Dr. Matthew Walker says the question of why we sleep remains "that archetypal mystery."

Walker, the principal investigator at the sleep lab the University of California, Berkeley, works with patients who suffer from sleep abnormalities. He says the complexity of sleep makes the research that much more fascinating.

"There have been so many great discoveries within science based on the revolution of sort of genetics and molecular biology, and sleep remains resistant to all of that in terms of an answer," he tells Weekend Edition host Rachel Martin.

Walker says there have been several critical discoveries, however, illuminating how sleep helps us learn and retain information. Researchers are also taking note of the negative side effects of not getting enough sleep.

Research on learning suggests "sleep is critical at almost all stages of memory formation, memory processing and long-term memory retention," he says.

Science also backs up historical anecdotes about how sleep fosters creativity.

"There seems to be some type of memory processing that's creative that starts to take pieces of information that we've learned recently and starts trying to test the connections between that recent information and all of the information you've got stored in your brain," he says. "So it's almost like memory pinball — you're bouncing that information around, you're testing which connections to build."

So what happens if you don't sleep? "A whole constellation of different brain and body functions start to deteriorate," he says. Our brains are less effective at absorbing new information without sleep. Plus, our ability to retain recently learned information is impaired, and "you lose the chance to essentially hit the save button on that information."

Aside from memorization, sleep deprivation makes it harder for the brain to regulate emotions.

From an evolutionary perspective, sleep doesn't seem like a good idea: survival instincts are on hold. But Walker says the fact that sleep has stuck around so long shows its biological importance.

"Sleep serves so many wonderful, beneficial functions that far outweigh those potential downsides to it," he says.

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Toshiba takes step toward 3D flash memory chips

Toshiba kicked off a project Friday that is the first step toward a new type of memory chip that could provide vastly greater capacity at a lower cost for digital gadgets such as cameras, smartphones and tablets.

The company held a groundbreaking ceremony to begin expansion of its number-five chip fabrication building (fab 5) in Yokkaichi, a state-of-the-art chip production facility in central Japan operated by Toshiba and SanDisk under a joint venture.

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The construction, which is scheduled to last a year, will see the production line expanded to accommodate additional chip fabrication capacity for NAND flash memory, including more advanced conventional manufacturing processes and early generation 3D production techniques.

3D chips are tipped to be the next big thing in the memory market and provide greater data storage capacity by stacking memory cells in layers. Using this method, greatly higher storage capacity can be realized while keeping the chips small enough to fit inside flash memory cards and the cramped insides of modern gadgets.

The project also indicates Toshiba's intention to remain a leader in the competitive flash memory market and also the company's belief that the market will continue to expand.

"After giving careful consideration to the balance of product supply and demand, and noting a recovery driven by growing demand for smartphones, tablets, SSD for enterprise servers, Toshiba now anticipates further medium- to long-term market expansion," the company said in a statement.

Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address is martyn_williams@idg.com

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SSDs still maturing, new memory tech still 10 years away

Solid-state drive adoption will continue to grow and it will be more than 10 years before it is ultimately replaced by a new memory technology, experts said.

SSDs are getting more attractive as NAND flash gets faster and cheaper, as it provides flexibility in usage as a RAM or hard-drive alternative, said speakers and attendees at the Hot Chips conference in Stanford, California on Sunday.

Emerging memory types under development like phase-change memory (PCM), RRAM (resistive random-access memory) and MRAM (magnetoresistive RAM) may show promise with faster speed and durability, but it will be many years until they are made in volume and are priced competitively to replace NAND flash storage.

SSDs built on flash memory are now considered an alternative to spinning hard-disk drives, which have reached their speed limit. Mobile devices have moved over to flash drives, and a large number of thin and light ultrabooks are switching to SSDs, which are smaller, faster and more power efficient. However, the enterprise market still relies largely on spinning disks, and SSDs are poised to replace hard disks in server infrastructure, experts said. One of the reasons: SSDs are still more expensive than hard drives, though flash price is coming down fast.

"It's going to be a long time until NAND flash runs out of steam," said Jim Handy, an analyst at Objective Analysis, during a presentation.

Handy predicted that NAND flash will likely be replaced by 2023 or beyond. The capacity of SSDs is growing as NAND flash geometries get smaller, so scaling down flash will become difficult, which will increase the need for a new form of non-volatile memory that doesn't rely on transistors.

Many alternative forms of memory are under development. Crossbar has developed RRAM (resistive random-access memory) that the company claims can replace DRAM and flash. Startup Everspin is offering its MRAM (magnetoresistive RAM) products as an alternative to flash memory. Hewlett-Packard is developing memristor, while PCM (phase-change memory) is being pursued by Micron and Samsung.

But SSDs are poised for widespread enterprise adoption as the technology consumes less energy and is more reliable. The smaller size of SSDs can also provide more storage in fewer servers, which could cut licensing costs, Handy said.

"If you were running Oracle or some other database software, you would be paying license fee based on the number of servers," Handy said.

In 2006, famed Microsoft researcher Jim Gray said in a presentation "tape is dead, disk is tape, flash is disk, RAM locality is king." And people were predicting the end of flash 10 years ago when Amber Huffman, senior principal engineer at Intel's storage technologies group, started working on flash memory.

Almost ten years on, flash is still maturing and could last even longer than 10 years, Huffman said. Its adoption will grow in enterprises and client devices, and it will ultimately overtake hard drives, which have peaked on speed, she said.

Like Huffman, observers agreed that flash is faster and more durable, but also more expensive than hard drives. But in enterprises, SSDs are inherently parallel, and better suited for server infrastructures that need better throughput. Multiple SSDs can exchange large loads of data easily much like memory, Huffman said. SSDs can be plugged into PCI-Express 3.0 slots in servers for processing of applications like analytics, which is faster than hard drives on the slower SATA interface.

The US$30 billion enterprise storage market is still built on spinning disks, and there is a tremendous opportunity for SSDs, said Neil Vachharajani , software architect at Pure Storage, in a speech.

Typically, dedicated pools of spinning disks are needed for applications, which could block performance improvements, Vachharajani said.

"Why not take SSDs and put them into storage arrays," Vachharajani said. "You can treat your storage as a single pool."

Beyond being an alternative primary storage, NAND could be plugged into memory slots as a slower form of RAM. Facebook replaced DRAM with flash memory in a server called McDipper, and is also using SSDs for long-term cold storage. Ultrabooks use SSDs as operating system cache, and servers use SSDs for temporary caching in servers before data is moved to hard drives for long-term storage.

Manufacturing enhancements are being made to make SSDs faster and smaller. Samsung this month announced faster V-NAND flash storage chips that are up to 10 times more durable than the current flash storage used in mobile devices. The flash memory employs a 3D chip structure in which storage modules are stacked vertically.

Intel is taking a different approach to scaling down NAND flash by implementing high-k metal gate to reduce leakage, according to Krishna Parat, a fellow at the chip maker's nonvolatile memory group. As flash scales down in size, Intel will move to 3D transistor structuring, much like it does in microprocessors today on the 22-nanometer process.

But there are disadvantages. With every process shrink, the endurance of flash may drop, so steps need to be taken to preserve durability. Options would be to minimize writes by changing algorithms and controllers, and also to use compression, de-duplication and hardware encryption, attendees said.

Smarter controllers are also needed to maintain capacity efficiency and data integrity, said David Flynn, CEO of PrimaryData. Flynn was previously CEO of Fusion-io, which pioneered SSD storage in enterprises.

"Whatever Flash's successor is, it won't be as fast as RAM," Flynn said. "It takes longer to change persistent states than volatile states."

But Flynn is already looking beyond SSD into future memory types.

"The faster it gets the better," Flynn said. "I'm excited about new, higher memories."

But SSDs will ultimately match hard drives on price, and the newer memory and storage forms will have to wait, said Huffman, who is also the chairperson for the NVM-Express organization, which is the protocol for current and future non-volatile memory plugging into the PCI-Express slot.

"Hard drives will become the next tape," Huffman said.

Agam Shah covers PCs, tablets, servers, chips and semiconductors for IDG News Service. Follow Agam on Twitter at @agamsh. Agam's e-mail address is agam_shah@idg.com

Agam Shah is a reporter for the IDG News Service in New York. He covers hardware including PCs, servers, tablets, chips, semiconductors, consumer electronics and peripherals.
More by Agam Shah, IDG News Service

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Toshiba takes step toward 3D flash memory chips

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Toshiba takes step toward 3D flash memory chips

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Flash breakthrough promises faster storage, terabytes of memory

In the ongoing quest for faster access to data, Diablo Technologies has taken what could be a significant next step.

Diablo's Memory Channel Storage (MCS) architecture, expected to show up in servers shipping later this year, allows flash storage components to plug into the super-fast channel now used to connect CPUs with memory. That will slash data-access delays even more than current flash caching products that use the PCI Express bus, according to Kevin Wagner, Diablo's vice president of marketing.

The speed gains could be dramatic, according to Diablo, helping to give applications such as databases, big data analytics and virtual desktops much faster access to the data they need most. Diablo estimates that MCS can reduce latencies by more than 85 percent compared with PCI Express SSDs (solid-state disks). Alternatively, the flash components could be used as memory, making it affordable to equip servers terabytes of memory, Wagner said.

Other than on-chip cache, the memory channel is the fastest route to a CPU, Wagner said. Not only do bits fly faster over this link, there are also no bottlenecks under heavy use. The connection is designed to be used by many DIMMs (dual in-line memory modules) in parallel, so each component doesn't have to relinquish the bus for another one to use it. That saves time, as well as CPU cycles that would otherwise be used managing the bus, Wagner said.

The parallel design of the memory bus also lets system makers scale up the amount of flash in a server without worrying about diminishing returns, he said. A second MCS flash card will truly double performance, where an added PCIe SSD could not, Wagner said.

Diablo, which has been selling memory controllers for about 10 years, has figured out a way to use the standard DDR-3 interface and protocols to connect flash instead of RAM to a server's CPU. Flash is far less expensive than RAM, but also more compact. The MCS components, which come in 200GB and 400GB sizes, will fit into standard DIMM slots that typically accommodate just 32GB or so of memory. The only adaptation manufacturers will need to make is adding a few lines of code to the BIOS, Wagner said.

Enterprises are more likely to use MCS as high-capacity memory than as low-latency storage, said analyst Jim Handy of Objective Analysis.

"Having more RAM is something that a lot of people are going to get very excited about," Handy said. His user surveys show most IT departments automatically get as much RAM as they can for their servers, because memory is where they can get the fastest access to data, Handy said.

"Basically, you'd like everything to be in the RAM," Handy said. Virtualized data centers, where many servers need to share a large set of data, need a shared store of data. But in other applications, especially with databases and online transaction processing, storage is just a cheaper and more plentiful -- but slower -- alternative to memory. "Everything that's on the storage is there just because it can't fit on the RAM," he said.

To implement the MCS architecture, Diablo developed software and a custom ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit), which it will sell to component vendors and makers of servers and storage platforms. Flash vendor Smart Storage Systems, which earlier this month agreed to be acquired by SanDisk, will be among the companies using the MCS technology, Wagner said. In addition, a tier-one server vendor is preparing about a dozen server models with the technology and will probably ship the first of them this year, Walker said.

For the most part, Diablo doesn't expect consumers or small enterprises to install MCS flash on their own computers. However, Diablo may work directly with enterprises that have very large data centers they want to accelerate, he said.

Using MCS flash to supplement DRAM would dramatically reduce the per-gigabyte cost of memory but also would allow for further consolidation of the servers in a data center, Wagner said. A large social networking company with 25,000 servers analyzed the MCS technology and said it would make it possible to do the same amount of work with just 5,000 servers.

That's because the current DRAM-only servers can be equipped with just 144GB of memory, but MCS would allow each server to have 16GB of DRAM and 800GB of flash. With that much memory, each server can do more work so fewer are needed, Wagner said. Fewer servers would mean savings of space and energy, which would translate into lower costs, he said.

Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com

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