9.
Booting from memory is old hat, in fact most the earliest computers did this because they could not anticipate anyone having a floppy disk drive because of the expense. So, they did it from ROM.
Even the IBM PC was available without a floppy disk drive, although I never did see one of these beasts and I doubt they sold many. So, even it booted to an OS of sorts, cassette BASIC.
Radio Shack took it one step further with their 1000 HX (and most of the succeeding home computers), by putting DOS 2.11 (it had a smaller footprint and was better known than 3.3, which was out at the time) in ROM. It loaded into RAM, rather than running out of ROM, to save memory in case a user wanted another version and booted from the floppy disk or hard disk (it saved memory because you did not map the ROM into the addressable range of the processor. If you did, and booted from the floppy, you lost that memory).
It is nothing new, and kind of a scary way of going about it, being on volatile memory. Then again, with Microsoft releasing lousy operating systems that have to be updated all the time, a ROM based solution would not do, unless it were erasable. It still kind of surprises me that Windows is not released on a PCI card with EEPROMS that would allow a user to boot up from that instead of a hard disk. If you added something like a browser, a lot of people would not even need the disagreeable hard disks they make now. Without a hard disk, you would save a lot of noise, a lot of heat, and a lot of room.
With regards to ECC, it seem incongruous for this product. I doubt any sane person would put anything that could be lost on something so tenuous as volatile memory. So, it is almost implied that you are taking some risks because losing the data will not be fatal and the risk is acceptable.
The thing that is a little unusual is that they want to keep the SATA protocol. On something as dreadfully slow as a hard disk, the overhead is essentially meaningless, but on RAM, it has to be extremely inefficient getting commands improper for the hardware and converting them to something more appropriate.
With regards to memory speed, even a tiny bit of thought will reveal the speed of the memory would not matter. If you are going through the PCI bus, you are limited to 33 MHz, and that is as fast as you are going to get the transfers regardless of whether you run the memory at 100 MHz or 200 MHz.
[Posted by: TA152H | Date: 10/04/05 03:30:58 AM]
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