Time to merge memory?
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Now that SSDs are becoming more common and with the rise of 64 bit architectures I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space. I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors, but I doubt they are 64 bits but if they are (and they could be), and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors. So ingrained is the idea of RAM and disc storage its hard to imagine what it would be like without it. Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system. Interesting thought - well if you're me anyway.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Welcome to Back to the Future.... 1979, to be precise. That was when the System/38 was introduced by IBM with a 48-bit addressing scheme. The system did away with notions of main memory being different from disk storage. Disk was managed as an extension of main memory. But then, according to the "we-know-best" Unix crowd, if it is not in Unix, it is not worth having. And in computer system architecture courses in Brain Washing Facilities -- sorry, Universities -- the only architecture worth learning teaching is the Intel '86 series!
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Now that SSDs are becoming more common and with the rise of 64 bit architectures I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space. I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors, but I doubt they are 64 bits but if they are (and they could be), and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors. So ingrained is the idea of RAM and disc storage its hard to imagine what it would be like without it. Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system. Interesting thought - well if you're me anyway.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Rob Philpott wrote:
and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors
That's a heck of a "gloss" you'd need there! Processors already cache your HDD accesses, so I suspect that to get a significant "real" mapped space, you would need huge amounts of RAM - and the cost of that would be horrific. Think about it: how much is 16GB ram? I bought a 2TB USB3 HDD last week for £67...that's a similar cost!
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
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Now that SSDs are becoming more common and with the rise of 64 bit architectures I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space. I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors, but I doubt they are 64 bits but if they are (and they could be), and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors. So ingrained is the idea of RAM and disc storage its hard to imagine what it would be like without it. Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system. Interesting thought - well if you're me anyway.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
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“Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities - that's training or instruction - but is rather making visible what is hidden as a seed”
“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated”Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535)
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Now that SSDs are becoming more common and with the rise of 64 bit architectures I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space. I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors, but I doubt they are 64 bits but if they are (and they could be), and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors. So ingrained is the idea of RAM and disc storage its hard to imagine what it would be like without it. Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system. Interesting thought - well if you're me anyway.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Basic RAM runs at ~20GB/sec, 2 x SSD in RAID0 does 1GB/sec Still a lot slower, but sure a lot better for virtual memory. I cannot fathom the amount kittens killed daily by my laptop hard drive... :((
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Rob Philpott wrote:
I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors,
The I7 has a 192-bit memory bus width and the Phenom II x6 1100T has 128-bit memory bus width. From Tom's Hardware[^]
Rob Philpott wrote:
I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space.
That definitely does seem reasonable, except that SSD's have a lifetime of about 5 years (somewhere on ArsTechnica was an excellent article on how SSD's work and why they have limits to their life), about the same as a hard disk, and DRAM etc. has a much longer life expectancy. Also, it still has to be worked out how to designate some data as persistent and other data as not persistent, hence why we have a file system to begin with - the user decides that, not the computer. But regardless of the technical issues, I think you have a good point as to where things might be heading. Marc
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My Blog192 bit?? I'm presuming that's the width of data and address bus combined but even then I'd expect 128 bits as a maximum. I need to read up, clearly...
Regards, Rob Philpott.
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Basic RAM runs at ~20GB/sec, 2 x SSD in RAID0 does 1GB/sec Still a lot slower, but sure a lot better for virtual memory. I cannot fathom the amount kittens killed daily by my laptop hard drive... :((
leppie wrote:
I cannot fathom the amount kittens killed daily by my laptop hard drive
Ask Ninja to count them in the morning and then count them again in the Evening; should be a fairly accurate measure. OT You know she tweeted about JB without warning? A guy could lose his lunch with that kind of disgusting imagery!
Reality is an illusion caused by a lack of alcohol
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leppie wrote:
I cannot fathom the amount kittens killed daily by my laptop hard drive
Ask Ninja to count them in the morning and then count them again in the Evening; should be a fairly accurate measure. OT You know she tweeted about JB without warning? A guy could lose his lunch with that kind of disgusting imagery!
Reality is an illusion caused by a lack of alcohol
Nagy Vilmos wrote:
You know she tweeted about JB without warning?
Thank goodness I missed that one ;p
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Nagy Vilmos wrote:
You know she tweeted about JB without warning?
Thank goodness I missed that one ;p
Sort it out will you! :laugh:
Reality is an illusion caused by a lack of alcohol
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leppie wrote:
I cannot fathom the amount kittens killed daily by my laptop hard drive
Ask Ninja to count them in the morning and then count them again in the Evening; should be a fairly accurate measure. OT You know she tweeted about JB without warning? A guy could lose his lunch with that kind of disgusting imagery!
Reality is an illusion caused by a lack of alcohol
Nagy Vilmos wrote:
Ask Ninja to count them in the morning and then count them again in the Evening; should be a fairly accurate measure.
I only got her to recite primes up to 51 so far. Even with O(1) factorization, it might not be enough!
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192 bit?? I'm presuming that's the width of data and address bus combined but even then I'd expect 128 bits as a maximum. I need to read up, clearly...
Regards, Rob Philpott.
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Now that SSDs are becoming more common and with the rise of 64 bit architectures I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space. I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors, but I doubt they are 64 bits but if they are (and they could be), and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors. So ingrained is the idea of RAM and disc storage its hard to imagine what it would be like without it. Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system. Interesting thought - well if you're me anyway.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Rob Philpott wrote:
Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system.
Presuming that they do become equal in replacement that would still not happen. The bus is still serial. Ip is still serial. Application bottlenecks still exist. Geographic redundancy needs still exist, etc.
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Welcome to Back to the Future.... 1979, to be precise. That was when the System/38 was introduced by IBM with a 48-bit addressing scheme. The system did away with notions of main memory being different from disk storage. Disk was managed as an extension of main memory. But then, according to the "we-know-best" Unix crowd, if it is not in Unix, it is not worth having. And in computer system architecture courses in Brain Washing Facilities -- sorry, Universities -- the only architecture worth learning teaching is the Intel '86 series!
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Now that SSDs are becoming more common and with the rise of 64 bit architectures I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space. I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors, but I doubt they are 64 bits but if they are (and they could be), and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors. So ingrained is the idea of RAM and disc storage its hard to imagine what it would be like without it. Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system. Interesting thought - well if you're me anyway.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
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Now that SSDs are becoming more common and with the rise of 64 bit architectures I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space. I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors, but I doubt they are 64 bits but if they are (and they could be), and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors. So ingrained is the idea of RAM and disc storage its hard to imagine what it would be like without it. Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system. Interesting thought - well if you're me anyway.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
small point most desktop windows PC work themselves into corrupted corners and need to be refreshed by restarting them If we only have one copy of each program in "ram" I lose my vital support tool of "restart the PC" or at least I could restart but it would have no benefit as I still just use the corrupted copy :( or does this utopia only allow perfect programs to be used?
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I prefer to keep my temp or swap (depending the OS in use) on my RAM... by creating a RAM disk... It's safe and recommended highly if you're on an SSD
Wait! Swap == RAM complementation, is it right!? So why did I would "lower" available RAM to create a RAM Drive to store a swap drive!?!?!? :confused:
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Wait! Swap == RAM complementation, is it right!? So why did I would "lower" available RAM to create a RAM Drive to store a swap drive!?!?!? :confused:
1. You're In no way like to thrash your SSD with rapid writes 2. You're never gonna make a good use of your 16 GB+ RAM! 3. For video and photo editors, which make a massive use of temp/swap space, it's a boon
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Now that SSDs are becoming more common and with the rise of 64 bit architectures I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space. I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors, but I doubt they are 64 bits but if they are (and they could be), and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors. So ingrained is the idea of RAM and disc storage its hard to imagine what it would be like without it. Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system. Interesting thought - well if you're me anyway.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
We already have RAMDisks (Which you can create using your own RAM and one of a myriad of free apps) These are generally crazily fast (20x faster than SSD's - Tested on my n00bish DDR2-800 RAM), although require actual RAM to store data (And due to the nature of RAM, would get your data lost in an unexpected power failure :p) If you have 10+ GB RAM, create yourself a 2GB+ RAMDisk, and benchmark it - You'll love the results ^_^
-= Reelix =-
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Now that SSDs are becoming more common and with the rise of 64 bit architectures I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space. I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors, but I doubt they are 64 bits but if they are (and they could be), and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors. So ingrained is the idea of RAM and disc storage its hard to imagine what it would be like without it. Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system. Interesting thought - well if you're me anyway.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
It will take a while for this, mainly because SSDs are not fast enough to compete with RAM speed, and even while we can create hard disks based on RAM modules they're not cheap nor very useful when power goes out.
CEO at: - Rafaga Systems - Para Facturas - Modern Components for the moment...
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Now that SSDs are becoming more common and with the rise of 64 bit architectures I've been wondering whether we might see the day soon where we don't distinguish between RAM and 'disc' storage, instead just mapping everything into a vast address space. I don't know how wide address buses are on 64 bit processors, but I doubt they are 64 bits but if they are (and they could be), and we gloss over problems to do with speed of access it seems possible. You'd need some sort of caching - a bit like on processors. So ingrained is the idea of RAM and disc storage its hard to imagine what it would be like without it. Persistence would disappear, as once you've instantiated an object there it would stay, indefinitely. I don't know what that would mean for the traditional idea of a file system. Interesting thought - well if you're me anyway.
Regards, Rob Philpott.
