[rbanffy]

Won’t that negatively impact the life expectancy of the device? FRAM is rated for trillions of reads and, if the SRAM is frequently read, a trillion reads isn’t that much.

[formerly_proven]

>100 trillion reads per location over 30 years still means you gotta read locations at over 100 kHz 24/7. Not good enough for main memory, sufficient even for frequently accessed configuration values.

[rbanffy]

Definitely not for running code directly from it (unless it's shadowed to RAM), but for storing config data or checkpoints, it makes sense.

[seritools]

I guess it depends on whether the game cartridges only use it for storing savegames, or as actual additional RAM.

[rbanffy]

Yes. It'd be a problem for running code directly from it - it'd be better to cache it to DRAM so that all reads would come from DRAM and only writes would make it to FE-RAM.

IIRC, it was a common trick with 286 and 386 PCs, because BIOS ROMs were 8-bit wide and shadowing the BIOS in RAM made it much faster.