HP To Introduce Flash Memory Replacement In 2013 253
Spy Hunter writes "Memristors are the basis of a new memory technology being developed by HP and Hynix. At the International Electronics Forum, Stan Williams, senior fellow at HP Labs, said, 'We're planning to put a replacement chip on the market to go up against flash within a year and a half. We're running hundreds of wafers through the fab, and we're way ahead of where we thought we would be at this moment in time.' They're not stopping at a flash replacement either, with Williams saying, 'In 2014 possibly, or certainly by 2015, we will have a competitor for DRAM and then we'll replace SRAM.' With a non-volatile replacement for DRAM and SRAM, will we soon see the end of the reboot entirely?"
Re:end of the HDD (Score:5, Informative)
What is old is new again.
There was a project at MIT LCS/AI back in the mid-80s to explore what it would mean to have massive amounts of RAM. A machine was designed with 1 GB of main memory. By today's standards, that's pathetic, but recall that this is in the era where PCs had 640 KB, max, and 1 GB was not only larger than every hard disk (desktop ones were at 10 MB, and even the big enterprise drives were only on order of 10 times bigger), but --- and this was the really important part -- would fill out the virtual address space, so there would be no need for a VM system. Hal Abelson and Gerry Sussman were behind these big ideas (the same duo who wrote Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs). I don't recall if the machine was actually built (maybe it was the Digital Orrery?), but I do recall one of the contrary viewpoints being that VM was considered important not just for simulating a larger memory system, but that for type-driven hardware like Lisp Machines, a huge address space was useful because the upper addressing bits could be used to encode type, even if that address space was too large to ever be populated.
Re:end of the HDD (Score:3, Informative)
IMHO the main advantage of a VM system is that a program doesn't need to care where its memory is located. It can always act as if it just owned all the memory up to some maximum address. The VM takes care of mapping that to the right place.