In the future even your RAM will have firmware; and the subject of POWER10 blobs

Re:In the future even your RAM will have firmware; and the s... by londons_explore on Thursday February 04, 2021 @09:47PM (#26032485)

I'm surprised we don't have "variable latency DRAM" yet. Ie. DRAM which can either return data quickly, or raise a flag saying it needs more time.

That would enable error detection circuitry to redirect some reads and writes around defects in the silicon without incurring a latency penalty for the majority of reads and writes.

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Re:In the future even your RAM will have firmware; and the s... by Hypx on Thursday February 04, 2021 @10:10PM (#26032614)

We sorta have that already in the form of virtual memory. The next step might be SCM (Storage Class Memory) where we use very fast NVM in lieu of SSDs or HDDs. Higher latency RAM would just be another tier in the memory hierarchy if it catches on.

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Re:In the future even your RAM will have firmware; and the s... by wiml on Friday February 05, 2021 @06:15PM (#26042424)

It used to be pretty common for RAM or peripherals to have wait states, or REQ/ACK handshakes, or similar mechanisms that would allow the peripheral to request a variable amount of time to respond.

I suspect it's not a more popular scheme because it makes it hard to pipeline your activity if there's unpredictable timing somewhere.

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