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[asian1]

Unfortunately the price of MRAM is 50 times more expensive than comparable RAM. The price for 4 MB MRAM is US$ 25.
Is it possible to hold the entire AmigaOS on 8 Megabytes of MRAM for fast booting process?

From BBC:
A microchip which can store information like a hard drive has been unveiled by US company Freescale.
The chip, called magnetoresistive random-access memory (Mram), maintains data by relying on magnetic properties rather than an electrical charge.
One analyst told the Associated Press news agency that the chip was the most significant development in computer memory for a decade.
Mram chips could find their way into many different electronic devices.
The benefit of Mram chips is that they will hold information after power has been switched off.
Freescale has been producing the four-megabit Mram chips at an Arizona factory for two months to build up levels of stock.
A number of chip makers have been pursuing the technology for a decade or more, including IBM, but Freescale is the first company to offer a chip with practical usage for many of today's electronic devices.
'Radically new'
"This is the most significant memory introduction in this decade," said Will Strauss, an analyst with research firm Forward Concepts.
"This is radically new technology. People have been dabbling in this for years, but nobody has been able to make it in volume."
Unlike flash memory, which also can keep data without power, Mram has faster read and write speeds and does not degrade over time.
Ram chips in most electronic devices, such as PCs, lose data when their power is switched off.
Currently flash memory is used in portable devices such as MP3 players and for portable storage in the form of small cards that are used in cameras.
Mram chips could one day be used in PCs to store an operating system, allowing computers to start up faster when switched on.
Bob Merritt, an analyst with Semico Research, said memory chip manufacturers were seeking technology that will be faster, smaller, cheaper and retain data when the power is off.

How does this affect the AmigaONE partners?

Will AmigaOS4 be released for motherboards that support MRAM?

[jkirk]

Is it possible to hold the entire AmigaOS on 8 Megabytes of MRAM for fast booting process?

sounds like a good idea if it can be implemented without performance issues.

[bloodline]

I wondered when mram would pop up on a.org... this is a massive step for memory technology... Though the Amiga will neverget to use such a technology... it is certainly possible that it will replace all other kinds of RAM (if they can get the speeds up), and will replace all ROMS/Flash if they can get the densities up.

Hybrid Hard Drives will benefit... though they need about 2000 times the 512K curently being manufactured :-)

[bloodline]

This news does explain where Freescale's development budget was being spent... it certainly wans't going on CPUs :-)

And their little gamble appears to have paid off... Working MRAM could make Freescale a major player again!

[Karlos]

What happens to MRAM in the presence of magnetic fields?

[bloodline]

Karlos wrote:
What happens to MRAM in the presence of magnetic fields?

A question I've been pondering for a while... it seems, but don't quote me on this, that it is unaffected by them :-) - from what I've read so far... about a thousand web sites and a few scientific papers, which didn't mention the effect of external magnetic fields...

-edit- google: giant magnetoresistive effects