Can you imagine a 1 TB DIMM? It's coming

Hi there
in Real world computing (not commercial servers etc but home users and small work places) lack of RAM (assuming you have more than the bare minimum installed) is very rarely a problem - the main exception is if you run a load of Virtual Machines concurrently.

Of course if you need to run 97 CPU bound applications concurrently then that's another issue - but most typical stuff a user executes on a computer is HUGELY I/O bound. The processor spends most of its time just waiting for user input.

The BIGGEST bottleneck in home computers is POOR DISKS -- a home computer fitted with 1TB RAM and only HDD's wouldn't run significantly better - if at all to an 8GB machine fitted with an SSD.

Once you've got sufficient RAM concentrate on improving the DISK I/O -- and until you have OS'es that rarely - if ever need external I/O that's the way it will stay. The current OS'es used in home / PC type machines still require DISKS whatever size of RAM is in them. (Mainframes are another matter but that's for another Forum).

Windows 237 or whatever it's called by then might make use of "Diskless OS" but even here most people want to save their data to EXTERNAL devices and you still need to obtain initial data FROM external sources -- even if it's banal things like streaming a movie from the Internet - the OS will not be any more efficient in buffering this stream to the internal 1TB DIMM rather than current 8GB DIMM'S -- The limiting speed is the data transfer from the net.

I LIKE technology - but it needs to be used in sensible situations -- not for example like tiny mobile phone cameras with midget sized noisy sensors and consumer grade lenses having 24 MP for example. !!

Cheers
jimbo.

jimbo45 said:

...

While I don't disagree with you in regards to how PCs are typically used these day, having 1TB+ of RAM could be very useful, and it could pretty easily be made into a virtual disk drive, where the HDD, SSD, or similar is just the "hard" copy, or backup that's loaded from a cold boot, and periodically written to during low computer use, or when being shut down.

The main problem with using RAM in this way is that it's volatile memory, and the data on it is lost during a power failure. Even so, because of it's extremely fast speed compared to other storage devices, it can very much be worth it. That aside, were 1TB+ of real RAM to quickly become readily available, I think it might change how computers are used, and we might not use traditional disk drives anymore, other than as backups, or the like. We would likely need a different power management system in place, and possibly battery power backup for suspended data storage on the RAM, similar to how BIOS batteries are used now.

Personally, I just leave my computer on nearly all the time and do periodic backups of my RAM drive. But I also use it as a Minecraft server, a mainframe of sorts for my Nexus 7 tablet, and crunch for BOINC on it.

Also, features such as SuperFetch make use of "excessive" RAM, working as a smart HDD cache to speed up the computer, in some cases, very significantly, like whole computer virus scans that only take a couple minutes to run that would otherwise maybe take an hour or so.

As far as I know, Windows turns off SuperFetch when using an SSD, unfortunately, as RAM is still many times faster, and if you've got enough available RAM, you might as well use it.

lehnerus2000 said:

jimbo45 said:

The BIGGEST bottleneck in home computers is POOR DISKS -- a home computer fitted with 1TB RAM and only HDD's wouldn't run significantly better - if at all to an 8GB machine fitted with an SSD.

Whilst I see your point, I think you are forgetting that you can use "excess" RAM in RAM discs.
With 1 TB of RAM, most people could run everything from RAM instead of their relying on their HDDs.

Even my cheap RAM is ~26x faster (if not more) than a lot of SSDs.

Wrend said:

While I don't disagree with you in regards to how PCs are typically used these day, having 1TB+ of RAM could be very useful, and it could pretty easily be made into a virtual disk drive, where the HDD, SSD, or similar is just the "hard" copy, or backup that's loaded from a cold boot, and periodically written to during low computer use, or when being shut down.

The main problem with using RAM in this way is that it's volatile memory, and the data on it is lost during a power failure. Even so, because of it's extremely fast speed compared to other storage devices, it can very much be worth it. That aside, were 1TB+ of real RAM to quickly become readily available, I think it might change how computers are used, and we might not use traditional disk drives anymore, other than as backups, or the like. We would likely need a different power management system in place, and possibly battery power backup for suspended data storage on the RAM.

Personally, I just leave my computer on nearly all the time and do periodic backups of my RAM drive. But I also use it as a Minecraft server, a mainframe of sorts for my Nexus 7 tablet, and crunch for BOINC on it.

Also, features such as SuperFetch make use of "excessive" RAM, working as a smart HDD cache to speed up the computer, in some cases, very significantly, like whole computer virus scans that only take a couple minutes to run that would otherwise maybe take an hour or so.

All PCs could come with a UPS.
It would only need to be able to run the RAM and HDDs for a few minutes.

Hi there
if we are going into UPS territory -- Solar Power is probably better -- devices are getting more efficient and don't need so much physical SUNSHINE - but just enough LIGHT.

BTW slightly OT but SPINACH has a great potential to be used as a BIOLOGICAL electricity generator -- shows POPEYE and Olive Oyl were right all those years ago.

Green, leafy spinach may soon power more than Popeye's biceps - MIT News Office

Here's some cartoons with POPEYE and Spinach

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoiljvWNC3g
Cheers
jimbo

In regards to solar power (which I myself am pretty keen on in general, mostly in a mad scientist/hermit with a cabin in the woods kind of way) you still need the availability of power when the sun isn't shining, so even then batteries are more or less a requirement. Now of course, you can still offset or even replaces the other power sources with solar power.

I think we could get away with a relatively low capacity, as lehnerus2000 alluded to, because we would only need enough power to backup the RAM, or keep it suspended, so we could probably use highly efficient batteries such as Li-ion type ones.

Not too sure about spinach, but I'll take your word on it.

Yeah, sorry about that. We just went off on a bit of a tangent about what-ifs.

I'm not seeing much of a benifit of using a DIMM/DDR interface over SATA III, PCIe 3.0 16x, or similar. Unless maybe flash memory is capable of much higher speeds than I'm aware of? (The GDDR5 throughput on my SLIed PCIe 3.0 16x graphics cards is roughly 143GB/s) And then you still have the limited read/write cycles compared to RAM. Seems like more of a niche solution that most won't get much benefit from.