Talk:Persistent memory

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Persistence is architectural and non-volatility is engineered. One is not the same as the other therefore redirection to non-volatile random access memory must be removed. In the words of Inktomi founder Eric Brewer (professor at UC Berkeley), "If you throw data to the four winds, and it sticks in enough places, you have achieved persistence." In other words, BitTorrent may provide persistence without requiring nonvolatility, simply by making several independently failing copies of data. Pmehra (talk) 23:39, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
 * From what I understood, this Persistent memory article is more about "Storage systems in Persistent memory", such as In-memory databases, in-memory file systems, etc. using NVDIMMs. Am I right ?
 * Why must those copies be "failing"? Please explain. --AVM (talk) 20:43, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

create disambiguation page
As far as I can tell, this "Persistent memory" article is a confusing mixture of two separate ideas:
 * persistence (computer science), where the operating system (or some other "persistence layer") gives the *illusion* that (quickly written) data written to RAM is still there even after a power cycle, using only standard volatile (quickly written) RAM and standard non-volatile (slow) secondary storage or other mass storage. Some of the early writers use the phrase "persistent memory", even though they are clearly talking about what we now call "persistent storage". Perhaps the earliest such "persistent operating system" was the 1969 Multics, before (commercial) microprocessors (much less PCs) existed. Other persistent operating systems are still under development and in use today, such as CapROS and Phantom OS, and can be run on pretty much any off-the-shelf personal computer hardware.
 * NVDIMM, hardware devices that plug into DIMM DRAM slots and similar hardware devices that can be read and written to like DRAM except, unlike DRAM, actually are non-volatile random-access memory. A few kinds of software take advantage of this capability, such as the NOVA (filesystem). My understanding is that this is relatively new, announced around 2015, and hardware that supports this is still relatively rare as of 2021.

I suggest we make this a disambiguation page that links to articles about these different kinds of "persistent memory", and split up the current contents and move each piece to the appropriate article about the specific kind of "persistent memory" that piece is discussing. --DavidCary (talk) 21:38, 27 August 2021 (UTC)