The innovation we are all waiting on is an SSD which has the speed and performance of RAM such that they become one in the same. With some chip yields as low as 30% we are approaching the limit of shrinking transistors and the next 10 years of innovation will have to be architectural. The idea of photon computers is also a direction we will see more research into and might be about to get a 1mhz light processor by 2030
Yeah what's going on? I bought a chunk of HP stock 10 years ago on the assumption they'd be revolutionizing swaths of the computing industry and it never materialized.
> The innovation we are all waiting on is an SSD which has the speed and performance of RAM
I've often wondered why no one offers a product that consists of DRAM with an integrated battery. Every portable device, when it goes into sleep mode, constitutes an existence proof that this could work. You could even integrate this with a regular SSD to provide persistence when the battery dies.
It's non-existence (or at least extreme difficulty to locate)for current gen tech suggests that it doesn't improve performance enough to be worth the tradeoffs, but I'm not an expert in that at all.
In theory, that would be MRAM - SRAM speeds, Non-volatile. Except as should be expected - there are details that have to be worked out in depth to ever allow such a substitution.
I thought modern computers are primarily cache limited and even running an os entirely on ram (on a system with no hdd/sdd) isn’t that much faster. I would be curious to see some data.
I'm halfway through the talk and he keeps mentioning points that are strangely reminiscent of things that usually come up when people like Mike Acton talk about Data-Oriented-Design, and writing code for the PS3's PPE-s
As I've said before, I just find it hard to believe that the very foreseeable problems lurking at the intersection of speculation, cache and protected mode were really such an unexpected shock to the industry https://youtu.be/kFT54hO1X8M?t=1195 . I have a jaded suspicion that in fact a fair few people had some idea, but they said nothing and didn't look closely because it would have been no fun, and in some cases not career-enhancing, to be the Jeremiah calling for major CPU deoptimisations. OTOH the very security-researcher heroes whose reputation is built on collecting trophies didn't seem to say much either, so maybe everyone really was completely blindsided?
I have anecdata that there were people who raised those exact concerns in those exact companies and were brushed off. If the companies were honestly surprised, it's because they purposely turned a deaf ear to the problem for the sake of greater revenue. But nothing really happened to those companies, so maybe it was ultimately a strategy that worked?
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 60.4 ms ] threadHeh... Yeah, I don't HP in it's current incarnation can revolutionize anything.
I've often wondered why no one offers a product that consists of DRAM with an integrated battery. Every portable device, when it goes into sleep mode, constitutes an existence proof that this could work. You could even integrate this with a regular SSD to provide persistence when the battery dies.
It's non-existence (or at least extreme difficulty to locate)for current gen tech suggests that it doesn't improve performance enough to be worth the tradeoffs, but I'm not an expert in that at all.
http://www.ddrdrive.com/
http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd-23.html
Add some batteries and a cronjob with rsync and you have the product you are looking for.
A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19237702 - Feb 2019 (8 comments)
A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19023734 - Jan 2019 (84 comments)
Also related:
John Hennessy and David Patterson Turing Award Lectures (2018) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18118957 - Oct 2018 (5 comments)
Hennessy and Patterson win Turing Award - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16637803 - March 2018 (32 comments)
I'd love to be able to browse hn threads on computer architecture without being reminded of the last time I (or a friend) was sexually assaulted.
And I dont think that particular term adds any clarity to your comment.
I too consider the use of the word `rape' unfortunate.