Instead of cracking open your PC to add extra memory, how about plugging it into a docking station that also gives you a faster processor so you can run more demanding applications?
Once PCs switch over to internal optical connections based on silicon photonics instead of the copper wires that run around today's motherboards, "we'll have a new way to design that gets rid of the distance limit," says Sean Koehl, a technology evangelist in Intel Labs.
"You can move the memory. Take a very mobile device like a netbook and imagine a docking station that also gives it a connection to faster processing and more memory." That could help with cooling; your notebook could get more powerful without getting hotter.
Memory on your PC is going to get faster as well, he says. "Memory bandwidth is very important and we're working on 3D stacking; the signals are going a shorter distance, the circuits they're driving are much simpler and we get a clean signal compared to the noisy, distorted signal we have to deal with when we're making the connection across the motherboard today."
Koehl also expects stacking one memory call on top of another to need less power as well as improving the connections between memory chips. Put it all together, suggests Koehl, and you get memory that's ten times more efficient than today's DRAMs.
