Another 5 to 10 years and flash will be memory mapped and on the mother board. It's simple economics, fewer parts = lower costs. Maybe it'll even go on-die at some point since the footprint of flash is a lot smaller than the footprint of RAM.
Why would Flash Drives be shipped as part of the mother board, but CPUs and Memory aren't? (Unless you are purchasing a Macintosh)
Factors in favor of placing the RAM closer to the CPU are increased speed and reduction in size but I think that the power consumption will remain a problem for the foreseeable future, process differences and the amount of die space required would be another.
Technically we already have flash drives on the motherboard, they are just a connector away from being a part of the whole. I think longer term the 'upgrade, repair or discard' factor is a lot lower with solid state memory than with spinning drives, stuff tends to get more compact over time and connectors are a source of trouble. So if the connector is already on the motherboard and the device lasts roughly as long as the mb and isn't a huge cost (flash is cheap compared to RAM) then I think it will make economic sense to at some point drop the connector. Once the mSata connector is out of the way there is no real reason not to widen the bus, thats just a couple of traces.
The logic could then be simplified because there is no real reason to simulate a spinning harddrive for a bunch of (slower) memory.
And then the next step to incorporate it into a chip further upstream isn't a big one, especially since it is a relatively compact die, there are already plenty of examples of CPUs with on-die flash, no reason why x86 wouldn't follow that trend.
The biggest stumbling block on that road would be the fact that there are also different processes used for manufacturing flash than for a cpu so you'd be looking at a single carrier with multiple dies or a flash device directly connected to one of the bridge chips.
Cost wise it would make good sense, reliability wise as well. Time will tell.
6.6 years ago, here on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177865 , was a link to "Scientists Create First Memristor: Missing Fourth Electronic Circuit Element" at Wired. User rms said: "I don't think we'll have any keeping up with Moore's Law. In 5 years memristor storage will be everywhere. IBM will develop memristor processors for the Blue Brain project." User TrevorJ said: "I fear that the huge inertia that is the software and hardware industry ... will keep this out of mainstream for 5-8 years."
In 2010 Engadget (at http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/31/hp-labs-teams-up-with-hyn... ) described a collaboration between HP Labs and Hynix. "Williams hopes to see the [memristor] transistors in consumer products by this time 2013, for approximately the price of what flash memory will be selling for at the time but with "at least twice the bit capacity.""
If anything, the optimism has become more pessimistic, as the future horizon lengthened from 5 years to 10. :)
-full of bad cells straight from factory -block erasable
you cant simply plonk it on the board, memory map and expect access like ram.