NAND Flash Better Than DRAM For PC Performance 205
Lucas123 writes "Adding NAND flash memory to a PC does more for performance than DRAM and costs less, according to a new study. As the price difference between the two memory types widens, NAND flash will become the memory of choice in the PC. The effects of NAND flash adoption are already being felt in the DRAM market, as revenue in 2011 is expected to decline 11.8%."
One Problem (Score:5, Informative)
NAND flash degrades over time and has a limited amount of program/erase cycles.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One Problem (Score:5, Informative)
NAND flash degrades over time and has a limited amount of program/erase cycles.
Spinning rust degrades over time and has a limited amount of write/erase cycles.
Total bullshit. Please try to have a clue when you try to be clever. There is no wearout mechanism which eventually makes it impossible to alter magnetic domain orientations in spinning rust. You can keep doing that forever. In practice, the lifespan of a HDD is limited by mechanical failure or the death of the controller electronics.
The difference between NAND flash and spinning rust is that it's faster. Early evolutions of NAND flash reached the limits of their write cycles therefore. Modern evolutions of NAND flash make it more durable and reliable than spinning rust in every instance - and the speed and storage density is just a bonus.
Good god, you're clueless. Every evolution of NAND flash makes its durability and reliability worse, not better, due to some fundamental physics problems with NAND technology. The only thing keeping NAND viable is throwing ever-stronger ECC codes at the problem (decreasing the effective density gain from each process shrink by consuming more bits in error correction overhead). Write/erase cycles also keep going down, not up.
And then there's the fun phenomenon called "read disturbance". If you haven't guessed just by reading the phrase, this means you can alter the state of a bit cell in the latest and greatest generation of NAND flash by reading it (or its neighbors) too many times. Whee!
Don't confuse the application of stronger and higher overhead techniques for managing the problems with NAND with it being a super-memory with no flaws. It has a lot of issues.
Re:One Problem (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention what TFA neglects is the simple fact that one doesn't need as much memory as they do storage space so comparing the two? More than a little pointless.
My interpretation of the article is as follows: In any given workload, you're likely to have a mixture of memory operations and disk operations. If, instead of putting all your money on RAM that will speed up your memory operations, you put part of it into an SSD that will speed up your disk operations, the overall performance for that workload will be better. Prefetching programs doesn't do nearly enough if the workload involves more disk activity than just loading the code.
Not sure I agree with the article, but the point is a lot better than you were making out to be.