121–130 of 205 posts
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.
So SanDisk is likely quoting a worst case read latency and/or a best case read IOPS. Customers are left to themselves to figure out which of these numbers is most likely to represent the average performance...
PS: here is a paper with some more details but that still fails to explain this discrepancy: http://www.snia.org/sites/default/files/SanDisk%20ULLtraDIMM...
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L1 Cache is an order of magnitude faster than L2 cache and that's still all on the same chip. That's not "a pretty small part". Energy consumption, heat dissipation, all of this becomes a larger problem for smaller structures. It's just easier and less error prone to build larger structures, yields are higher, so costs are lower for larger structures. I'm certain the tradeoffs will change, but it's all limited by som…
These caches are currently implemented with SRAM, a technology which uses 6 transistors per bit. Find a different technology (such as memristors) and our entire set of tradeoffs are likely to change. The laws of physics dictate what the ultimate limits of a techology are; they do not dictate which technologies you actually choose to use.
I never said so, I agree. I'm just stating that I'm confident that in the future, we'll still have tradeoffs. And I'm certain those will include "fast and small, but expensive" vs. "slow and cumbersome, but cheap".
We already reached the point where it's a problem that the clock signal on a die spreads so slow that it's a significant problem to increase the clock rate. So we're pushing parallel computing and other solutions, but those come with their own set of trades to make.
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I will archive this thread to save this: > 1TB of non-volatile storage [...] Most average consumers won't use all of that
I'm with you I got my first 1TB HDD last year thinking it would last a few years. Nearly full now. Why? Because with all that space available I've changed how I use disk space - why throw stuff away. Also that I've moved to a higher grade camera and moved to consuming video stored on HDD rather than from discs. When we're creating fully immersive 4D environments in place of holiday snaps then I imagine we're going to…
Funny, I'm the opposite. With all this bandwidth available, why keep stuff?
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I will archive this thread to save this: > 1TB of non-volatile storage [...] Most average consumers won't use all of that
I'm with you I got my first 1TB HDD last year thinking it would last a few years. Nearly full now. Why? Because with all that space available I've changed how I use disk space - why throw stuff away. Also that I've moved to a higher grade camera and moved to consuming video stored on HDD rather than from discs. When we're creating fully immersive 4D environments in place of holiday snaps then I imagine we're going to…
The 'enables new opportunities that were previous infeasible' component is more exciting. But generally, I think most of it gets swallowed up in more of the old.
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Traditional memory continues to become cheaper too. Flash is dimes a gigabyte, disk is cents a gig and videotape tenths of a cent per gigabyte. So supercomputers will always be maxing out each level of memory. And you will still need worry about memory hierarchies. For ordinary computing, maybe a terabyte of flash will finally be enough.
Flash is really closing in on disk, though. If costs continue to halve biannually, and capacities keep rising like they do, they might intersect around 12 - 16TB in five to ten years.
I would be willing to wager that new models of laptops in 2020 with spinning disk will be uncommon, and, by 2023, except for niche verticals. basically non-existent. Same for Desktop 2 years later in each category.
2025 will mark the end of consumers buying spinning disk.
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HP is already working on this with what they're calling "The Machine". They're writing a new OS around the new storage technologies with the understanding that it might not make sense to separate RAM from disk pretty soon here. They've also suggested that they'll be porting versions of Linux and Android to this platform. Of course, all of this is pretty marketing heavy and not a lot of details have been released, so…
I am not sure it is even a real project. I tried to find anyone working on it and failed. Nice story though.
(source: I'm a cs professor at carnegie mellon, and I was just chatting with some of those researchers at OSDI.)
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HP is already working on this with what they're calling "The Machine". They're writing a new OS around the new storage technologies with the understanding that it might not make sense to separate RAM from disk pretty soon here. They've also suggested that they'll be porting versions of Linux and Android to this platform. Of course, all of this is pretty marketing heavy and not a lot of details have been released, so…
I am not sure it is even a real project. I tried to find anyone working on it and failed. Nice story though.
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Traditional memory continues to become cheaper too. Flash is dimes a gigabyte, disk is cents a gig and videotape tenths of a cent per gigabyte. So supercomputers will always be maxing out each level of memory. And you will still need worry about memory hierarchies. For ordinary computing, maybe a terabyte of flash will finally be enough.
Flash is really closing in on disk, though. If costs continue to halve biannually, and capacities keep rising like they do, they might intersect around 12 - 16TB in five to ten years.
Problem with Flash is the more you pack in same volume the more of it comes out bad, while the rest is fragile ticking bomb.
Replacing slow, but reliable HDD with 100 writes limited flash is not the answer.
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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?