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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

It would be nice to see a set of slots for both RAM or an SSD. So your laptop may have four slots total, and you can mix and match RAM or drives as you see fit.

The technology to do this is already commercially available in servers. Just need it to come to laptops or PCs.

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At some point, I hope to see the lines between RAM and SSDs dissolve, such that the OS can just use a portion of the SSD for RAM.

Uhh, unless SSD technology changes significantly that line is a long long way off. SSDs are orders of magnitude slower than RAM. For example assuming a 2 GB/s speed is legitimate, RAM is over 22 GB/s. Plus RAM can be written and re-written without any wear, whereas SSDs have a max-write limit.

Right. Plus when you power off RAM ... Oops!

I think it's supposed to happen with these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

HP is working on a new architecture based on computers with just a buttload of persistent RAM, but so far it's vaporware.

Supposedly they will never sell this computer, only renting access as a "fast cloud".

I would think the recent historical tendency is to have more cache levels, not fewer. This would only happen if the cost of storage loses its sensibility to speed.

Isn't that called "swap"?

No. Swap or paging is unused RAM "saved for later" (to free up real RAM space). It is never accessed or modified directly from processes except to push it back into RAM when a process requests a memory region which has been paged.

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