Yowza! 2 TB and 3.5 GB/s reads? That’s scary!
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Do we really need DRAM anymore?
An excellent question. I'm running an ultrabook with only 4 GB of RAM very adequately. The thing smokes.
So, on my desktop my new 500 GB SSD is nearly 20% full. Time to upgrade! (Why do I do this?) ;-)
“Do we really need DRAM anymore?”
In a nutshell, yes :-). Writing a flash cell causes a *tiny* amount of damage to the storage element. This damage accumulates over time and renders the cell useless. Don’t worry though, it takes millions and millions of writes to damage the cell permanently. Moreover, engineers of these disks employ algorithms called “write leveling” which helps distribute writes to redundant storage elements to help distribute wear and tear. The end result is a disk with a life as long or better than the best traditional, electromechanical hard disks out there.
If you were to use the flash cell as your primary memory in your system (outside of the cache memory on the CPU), you’d hit these cells quite frequently ... the end result would be a permanently damaged memory in relatively little time.
DRAM is going to be one of those elements in a computer that’s comparable to hydrogen :-). I suspect both DRAM and Ethernet will be around in some form for a long, long time :-). Both scale relatively well, are dirt cheap, and do what they do very well :-).
However, a very good professor friend of mine always warned me that one “stupid” research paper can make definitive claims such as the one I just made look absolutely ridiculous as early as tomorrow :-).