Hacker News Reader

Comment by cosmiccatnap | Hacker News Reader

The innovation we are all waiting on is an SSD which has the speed and performance of RAM such that they become one in the same. With some chip yields as low as 30% we are approaching the limit of shrinking transistors and the next 10 years of innovation will have to be architectural. The idea of photon computers is also a direction we will see more research into and might be about to get a 1mhz light processor by 2030

View on HN

> The innovation we are all waiting on is an SSD which has the speed and performance of RAM

I've often wondered why no one offers a product that consists of DRAM with an integrated battery. Every portable device, when it goes into sleep mode, constitutes an existence proof that this could work. You could even integrate this with a regular SSD to provide persistence when the battery dies.

This has existed in various forms through the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive (section: Dedicated hardware RAM drives)

It's non-existence (or at least extreme difficulty to locate)for current gen tech suggests that it doesn't improve performance enough to be worth the tradeoffs, but I'm not an expert in that at all.

This has been done for decades. For various reasons it hasn't become mainstream. Cost of DRAM is one of those reasons.

They exist mostly for servers. The capacity is much smaller since DRAM is much more expensive.

http://www.ddrdrive.com/

A company called Violin Memory used to make one for servers:

http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-23.html

You can create persistent ramdisk with tmpfs.

Add some batteries and a cronjob with rsync and you have the product you are looking for.

there even was NVDIMM

Persistent storage is not really a bottleneck. Single-threaded performance is. This is the innovation we are waiting for.

I thought modern computers are primarily cache limited and even running an os entirely on ram (on a system with no hdd/sdd) isn’t that much faster. I would be curious to see some data.

In theory, that would be MRAM - SRAM speeds, Non-volatile. Except as should be expected - there are details that have to be worked out in depth to ever allow such a substitution.

Are memristors still 5 years away or did HP bury those for business reasons?

Yeah what's going on? I bought a chunk of HP stock 10 years ago on the assumption they'd be revolutionizing swaths of the computing industry and it never materialized.

> HP ... revolutionizing swaths of the computing industry

Heh... Yeah, I don't HP in it's current incarnation can revolutionize anything.

That was sort of hyperbole, but the question stands :)

I think if you have a bet like that it’d make more sense to buy a sector ETF.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com