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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Analogous beliefs about new RAM models up-ending the market for memory turned out to be far slower to hit the streets, and had far less impact on the DRAM market.

I would love to have something at modern memory speed, which behaved like core: Turn off the machine, its run-state is frozen. Turn back on, the memory state is still there.

But the reality is that machines are built to DRAM, and DRAM persists as the basic memory model for the "architecture" of a system

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FRAM exists, but is way behind the miniaturization curve, and I think is only available from TI?

You can save memory after turning the system off, and swap pages in after turning on.

even if its not faster than DRAM I wonder at what point would it just not make sense to have two separate modules. Like all the volitile storage in a system could be in the L-cache/s on the CPU and for most things that plus this faster non-volitile storage would do the trick. I wonder what kind of optimizations would have been made in a world where stuff like DRAM just didnt exist and we just had to deal with the bottlenecks of non-volitile storage media

Sounds like the era when we mainly transitioned to solid state storage. When spinning rust was the primary technology and RAM prices were high, you could buy hybrid drives that had small amounts of solid state cache (mainly intended for common OS files). And even today, all but the cheapest SSDs will have onboard DRAM for better write speeds.

That's true but you can get creative in a case where you don't need to page things back in from the disk. You could do something like powering off the entire system (assuming you have this kind of memory in the CPU too) while you're waiting for a disk read, if there's nothing else to do. So I could see big potential for power savings in things like phones and other battery powered devices.

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