Posted by ketyung
on Apr/20/2009
at 7:15 am
Rebooting your computer is painful as you have to wait at least over a few minutes or more for the computer to boot into Windows. This is why I’ll always leave my laptop on standby mode to reduce the needs to boot from the start again.
But maybe not far in the future, instant-on computers with zero boot-time would be possible. As researchers at Cornell University, Penn State University and Northwestern University, have found the ferroelectric materials used in today’s smart cards for ATM can be added into common computer transistors, which could produce computers that have zero boot-time.
Ferroelectric materials provide low-power, high-efficiency electronic memory. Smart cards use the technology to instantly reveal and update stored information when waved before a reader. A computer with this capability could instantly provide information and other data to the user.
The computers have zero boot time as because they will have memory devices (made using Ferroelectric materials) that are lower power and much higher speed. And these super high-speed memory devices would no more need the users to wait for the operating system to come online or to access memory slowly from the hard drive.
July 25th, 2009 at 10:19 am
First: Credit cards are just magnetic strips. In reality, theres no difference between reading a credit cards strip or a harddrives disk or a cassettes tape. The data would be transfered at the same rate. And adding that to anywhere else on a motherboard wouldn’t change that.
Boot time happens because of the amount of time it takes to find, open, process and copy the data from the HDD to the RAM. It needs to do this because when the RAM looses power when the computer is shut off, all the binary on the RAM changes to 0.
We can’t use magnetic strips or disks AS the RAM because it’s Random Access Memory. And seeking random sectors billions of times a minute would be impossible with todays storage devices.
Without RAM, everything you do and see on the computer would need to be transfered from the harddrive to the UIs and outputs and back again millions of times every minute.. Far faster than our best magnetic devices.
You would need to physically have the magnetic head at each individual sector on the storage media to transfer it, and theres where the lag comes from.
The only “Zero boot time” solution is Flash directly as part of the RAM. Flash is much faster than Hard Drives and since it has no physically moving parts, it can be integrated into the actual motherboard one day.
It would eliminate the need to transfer over all the information of the operating system before being able to accept user input and do what it’s made to do.
Flash however, has a limited lifespan. It can only be overwritten a specific amount of times before failing. That number is always increasing as we develop better technology, but untill it can compare to how many times we can write data on a stick of RAM, the data would still need to be transfered to standard RAM at some point after pressing the ON button. Instant-on, yes. But not full speed untill it’s loaded onto RAM.
The only options for Instant ON is having the information you need already on the RAM when you press the power button, or getting it there in an impossibly small fraction of the time it takes now.
August 20th, 2009 at 5:01 am
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