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I can't wait to see the programming paradigm of memory vs permanent storage begin to blur in the next 5 or so years. It's going to make some major assumptions a
by NamTaf 12y ago
I can't wait to see the programming paradigm of memory vs permanent storage begin to blur in the next 5 or so years. It's going to make some major assumptions about how you program stuff change quite significantly and it's really exciting.
- film42 12y agoI agree! I wonder what will happen when memory and IO are essentially the same speed. Will we still need complex cache stores?
- Xylakant 12y agoI doubt that will happen ever, there's always a tradeoff between cost, speed and space (on the die, ...), otherwise we'd all be running machines with 1TB L1 Cache.
- chongli 12y agoJust because we've had to make tradeoffs so far does not mean these tradeoffs will always exist. Tradeoffs like these are not a natural law.
- pjc50 12y agoYes they are, because the storage isn't arbitrarily small. There is always the latency of distance to overcome. That includes the centimeters to your main memory. There's always going to be a capacity-latency tradeoff.
- tormeh 12y agoThat's a bit pedantic, though. The unavoidable tradeoffs are a pretty small part of the total that we're dealing with now.
- Xylakant 12y agoL1 Cache is an order of magnitude faster than L2 cache and that's still all on the same chip. That's not "a pretty small part". Energy consumption, heat dissipation, all of this becomes a larger problem for smaller structures. It's just easier and less error prone to build larger structures, yields are higher, so costs are lower for larger structures. I'm certain the tradeoffs will change, but it's all limited by some physical law and while we can sometimes trade one law against the other, we can't currently break them, so tradeoffs will always exist.
- micampe 12y agoI don’t disagree with you one bit, but I find it funny that you say: “we can't currently break them, so tradeoffs will always exist.” :) (That “currently” is just a weasel word, but this being the Internet I understand why you put it there)
- Xylakant 12y agoWell, I can rephrase that "I don't expect fundamental laws of nature to change any time soon." But laws that were assumed to be fundamental have been found to be false in the past, so I don't want to rule that out for the future either.
- jjoonathan 12y agoIt is highly probable that we will discover memory that is better than current memory in every relevant metric (I suspect this is what you think you are claiming). It is highly improbable that this new technology cannot be optimized in any relevant metric by trading off optimality in a different metric (this is what you are actually claiming).
- micampe 12y agoThe sentence “I'm certain the tradeoffs will change” implies that both your interpretations are wrong.
- 12y ago
- userbinator 12y agoTradeoffs like these are not a natural law They are, they're the laws of physics. According to known theories information cannot travel faster than the speed of light, so unless a very very radical new discovery is made sometime in the future, size and speed will basically be inversely proportional to each other.
- chongli 12y agoThe laws of physics don't dictate what technologies we know, only what their ultimate limits are. Just because our current memory technologies have some limitations that force us to make a tradeoff does not mean this will always be the case. Just look back at how things were before the discovery of GMR[0]. We had very different tradeoffs then as compared to now. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_magnetoresistance
- Symmetry 12y agoAs long as we care about computational latency, the forces that give rise to caching will continue to hold force. The speed of light places a fundamental limit on the response time from a storage system of a given physical volume, and there are equivalent physical laws on the maximum amount of information that can be stored in that volume. Which technologies we use for our caches and main storages will change, but we're never going to get around the need for caching.
- sitkack 12y agoAssuming you are still using a von Neumann architecture. You are arguing past chongli, not with.
- petercooper 12y agoMemristors (long promised and still not quite here) also bring together the ideas of long-term and short-term memory into one and, in future incarnations, even promise to bring computation and storage together.
- pjc50 12y agoYou can get that today with FRAM, although not at high density. TI do microcontroller eval boards with built in FRAM; you can have your device resume automatically from power loss with all its memory still there.
- mafuyu 12y agoThe problem with FRAM is that it wears very quickly. That's why it hasn't seen wider use.
- valarauca1 12y agoWhen they work (there is to much cash on the table for them not too), they'll completely change the way we think of volatile and non-volatile memory. Since all memory will be non-volatile. It'll be a huge paradigm shift in storage and IO speed.
- nacnud 12y ago.. and possibly give viruses more places to hide?
- deeviant 12y agoNa, virus already hide both on disk and in memory.
- valarauca1 12y agoUnlikely. Unless we start making file systems different.
- 12y ago
- peter303 12y agoTraditional memory continues to become cheaper too. Flash is dimes a gigabyte, disk is cents a gig and videotape tenths of a cent per gigabyte. So supercomputers will always be maxing out each level of memory. And you will still need worry about memory hierarchies. For ordinary computing, maybe a terabyte of flash will finally be enough.
- zanny 12y agoFlash is really closing in on disk, though. If costs continue to halve biannually, and capacities keep rising like they do, they might intersect around 12 - 16TB in five to ten years.
- ghshephard 12y agoSometime before that, I'm guessing in about 3 years +/- 6 months, the capacity+performance advantages of flash will reach a point where spinning disk doesn't make sense, volumes of flash being ordered start to accelerate, spinning disk volumes plateau, and investments in developing the technology adjust accordingly (more investment in improving flash, less in spinning disk) I would be willing to wager that new models of laptops in 2020 with spinning disk will be uncommon, and, by 2023, except for niche verticals. basically non-existent. Same for Desktop 2 years later in each category. 2025 will mark the end of consumers buying spinning disk.
- mark-r 12y agoI think it will happen much sooner than that. Flash doesn't have to match the price/GB of hard drives, it just has to match at the minimum viable system level. A lot of people could survive with 120GB, and that number goes up drastically when you hit 240GB. When the price of those SSDs reaches the hard drive floor of about $50, hard drives will become a niche product appealing only to those who actually need multiple terabytes.
- hadoukenio 12y ago> I would be willing to wager that new models of laptops in 2020 with spinning disk will be uncommon How about more like 2015. You're already forgetting MacbookAir/Chromebook/Ultrabook crowd are slowly taking over (which have no spinning disks).
- luma 12y agoHP is already working on this with what they're calling "The Machine". They're writing a new OS around the new storage technologies with the understanding that it might not make sense to separate RAM from disk pretty soon here. They've also suggested that they'll be porting versions of Linux and Android to this platform. Of course, all of this is pretty marketing heavy and not a lot of details have been released, so take this with a huge grain of salt. HP's CTO wrote a fluff piece on flattening the storage hierarchy here: http://www8.hp.com/hpnext/posts/end-necessary-evil-collapsing-memory-hierarchy http://www8.hp.com/hpnext/posts/end-necessary-evil-collapsin...
- justincormack 12y agoI am not sure it is even a real project. I tried to find anyone working on it and failed. Nice story though.
- innguest 12y agoIt must be related to their work on memristors which is why they should probably keep it a secret for a while.
- andyjohnson0 12y agoArs [1] and Businessweek [2][3] published articles about it recently. [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hp-labs-machine-dissolves-the-difference-between-disk-and-memory/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/06/hp-lab... [2] http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/206401-with-the-machine-hp-may-have-invented-a-new-kind-of-computer http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/206401-with-the... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878949
- JibberMeTimbers 12y agoCheck out stuff from 'Discover 2014'. Discover is HP's tech showcase event. I linked a video below from Day 2 of this years showcase. About halfway through, Martin Fink goes into a bit on how it's supposed to work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxn5ru7klUQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxn5ru7klUQ
- amalag 12y agoAnd AMD is aiming towards a shared GPU/CPU architecture too.
- sjtrny 12y agoI'm really excited for shared RAM between GPU and CPU. At the moment GPU acceleration is limited by the meagre amount of VRAM on most desktop cards. I would love to be able to do GPU programming with a 32+GB RAM pool.
- Shivetya 12y agoHow is this different than IBM's single store model? Memory and disk are addressed as one with hardware providing the protection needed in case of component or system failure. Unless your writing at the machine level I really do not see the need for most programmers to ever concern themselves with storage, that should be the work of the underlying machine code and/or OS.
- sebastianavina 12y agoif ram and permanent storage becomes the same, in instance, you wont need to "open(" a file, just to point to the memory location of it.
- maxidog 12y agoIs that fundamentally different from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory-mapped_file http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory-mapped_file ?
- hrjet 12y agoI was just thinking about this the other day. Yes, a memory-mapped-file is different, because the API is still that of a file. The memory mapping is just a behind-the-scenes optimisation.
- jacquesm 12y agoOnly if you want posix compliance across threads and such. If you just want the contents of the file memory mapped nothing stops you from setting up a shared memory segment and mapping it without that filesystem overhead.
- hrjet 12y agoDoes that work for writes as well? I am not sure if it would work without the OS setting up traps for writes to the pages or explicit flush calls from the app. In the former case, it would be very inefficient, and in the latter, it wouldn't be a clean write-and-forget system.
- piyush_soni 12y agoThe smartphones of today are already doing it?
- frandroid 12y agoNo, they still have separate flash storage and RAM. The iPhone 6 Plus, for example, has 1 GB RAM.
- spitfire 12y agoIBM went all the way with this in the AS/400 back in the 80's. Single level store - RAM and disk were unified storage. with no ability for a programmer to tell the difference (RAM was purely and operations problem).
- sedachv 12y agoThe single-level store started with Soltis' System/38 in the 1970s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/38 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System/38 I really recommend Frank Soltis' Inside the AS/400 if you are interested in computer architecture and virtualization.
- vibrolax 12y agoIn my recollection, the Multics OS (1964) was the first attempt to make this practical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multics
- bduerst 12y agoWhat's the limiting factor today? Aren't the latest versions of PCI-e SSDs already approaching early version DDR3 transfer rates?