> I wonder if we'll eventually have storage cheap enough and fast enough At a fundamental level, RAM is faster than flash/hdd for two basic reasons: it's allo

> I wonder if we'll eventually have storage cheap enough and fast enough At a fundamental level, RAM is faster than flash/hdd for two basic reasons: it's allowed to be volatile, and your working set is usually much smaller than your total storage requirements, so RAM is allowed to be more expensive on a byte-for-byte basis than persistent storage. Unless something weird happens with relative research paces, you can basically expect RAM to be faster than persistent storage for those two reasons. The question then becomes: at what point whether there is a point where even persistent storage is fast enough that your CPU/GPU/*PU can't make use of any further bandwidth/latency improvements. Looking at the relative performance of L1, L2, L3, and RAM sets some milestones you need to hit before this even becomes a long-term goal.