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Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

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Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#52
post #28
post #26

What OS support exists for this, and how does it work?

You need not just OS support but specific motherboard too. Currently AFAIK this is only supported on SuperMicro dev kits.

What's the point of making it DDR3 DIMM compatible if they require a special motherboard to plug in?

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#53
post #45
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because we've had to make tradeoffs so far does not mean these tradeoffs will always exist. Tradeoffs like these are not a natural law.

Yes they are, because the storage isn't arbitrarily small. There is always the latency of distance to overcome. That includes the centimeters to your main memory. There's always going to be a capacity-latency tradeoff.

That's a bit pedantic, though. The unavoidable tradeoffs are a pretty small part of the total that we're dealing with now.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#54
post #11

Is the advantage the low latency because the rest of the specifications seem to be pretty standard for an SSD. Does this require a BIOS patch of some sort?

I suppose the main usage will be a RAMDISK mounted partition which will not lose its data on Server reboot, power loss or when program is not running. I don't think this SSD can be accessed through regular SCSI, IDE, AHCI controllers. http://www.sandisk.com.br/enterprise/ulltradimm-ssd/

Yes it would be very cool to have the entire operating system in SSD. Literally flick the computer on and it's running ;)

Or flick rapidly between Linux and Windows. That makes me think it might be wise to have a manager to do this. E.g. leave the disks accessible between three+ operating systems.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#55
post #3

I can't wait to see the programming paradigm of memory vs permanent storage begin to blur in the next 5 or so years. It's going to make some major assumptions about how you program stuff change quite significantly and it's really exciting.

And AMD is aiming towards a shared GPU/CPU architecture too.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#56

This is pretty cool, especially since the data is persistent. You could put an entire data warehouse onto one or of a couple of these things, update it once a week and get amazing response time. But I thought the main drawback of SSDs was that eventually the individual memory cells will degrade and lose the ability to write new data. I don't see anything about endurance other than a MTBF of 2.5 million hours and the…

2.5 Mhours MTBF equates to 285 years. That's a long time.

On any kind of large-scale installation you need redundancy, but if those numbers pan out then you could expect any single SSD to outlast your organisation.

Take backups anyway.

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#57
post #28
post #26

What OS support exists for this, and how does it work?

You need not just OS support but specific motherboard too. Currently AFAIK this is only supported on SuperMicro dev kits.

Wouldn't mounting the RAM stick as a ramdisk be enough though?

Re: Bringing SSD Performance to the DIMM form factor

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memristors (long promised and still not quite here) also bring together the ideas of long-term and short-term memory into one and, in future incarnations, even promise to bring computation and storage together.

When they work (there is to much cash on the table for them not too), they'll completely change the way we think of volatile and non-volatile memory. Since all memory will be non-volatile. It'll be a huge paradigm shift in storage and IO speed.

.. and possibly give viruses more places to hide?
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