My prediction for the next 10 years

[Humodour]

RAM (as main memory) will disappear. 'Secondary memory' will no longer be HDs or SSDs. It will be MRAM. Because of this, the concept of 'paging' algorithms will be redundant and fall by the wayside. The I/O bottleneck (the entire reason SSDs are better than HDs) will thus also disappear. Computers, due to MRAM being non-volatile, will boot in around 1 second. And they will boot to exactly the last state they were when they were turned off - just like hibernation mode. MRAM, being made of magnets and not electric charges, will consumes close to zero electricity. It will also be close to impervious to EMP attacks.

 

The lowest level of CPU cache will probably still be SRAM, as it is slightly faster than MRAM, but there will be a level of cache above that made of a huge amount of MRAM. Or, possibly, there won't be any MRAM cache at all, since the MRAM main memory will be sufficiently fast.

 

I might be wrong in choosing MRAM as the likely victory in the race to universal memory, but the general points are all valid regardless of what universal memory technology wins (except maybe the radiation resistance point - only really applies to non-electric memory like MRAM).

 

The largest size of MRAM today is 8 megabytes - it is being built into SSDs just this year to replace the existing volatile cache for these devices, which is very vulnerable in power failures. Apply a variation of Moore's law (for instance, in 2010 the largest MRAM size was 2 meg). It's not difficult to see hard drives, SSDs, and DDR RAM all being made redundant as MRAM develops. Obviously they'll still be around, just like magnetic tapes are still around today. But not in mainstream use.

 

Nifty concept huh? Turing never envisaged his machines needing multiple types of memory. And they needn't.

 

Edit: As far as speed goes, MRAM has been built which has a speed of 2 Gbit/s on write cycles. This will improve over time, but is already more than 4 times that of current SSDs. By comparison, the fastest DDR RAM at the moment (caveat: haven't checked DDR4 speeds) is around 12 Gbit/s. So MRAM isn't as fast as RAM yet, but it's getting there. So MRAM is at around the same speed as DDR1 RAM running at 266 Mhz. DDR3 which is common in premium-end PCs today runs at 1600 Mhz (directly translating to a proportional increase in data transfer rate). Does anybody remember the RAM wars that popped up when DDR first came out and replaced SDRAM and was competing with RDRAM? Wasn't too long ago.

Edited May 16, 2012 by Krezack