This makes perfect sense. In 2011, Objective Analysis published a report (How PC NAND Will Undermine DRAM) that found, through nearly 300 benchmarks, that a dollar’s worth of flash yielded a bigger performance boost than a dollar’s worth of DRAM, once some minimum DRAM requirement was met. This minimum level was actually relatively low — between 1 and 2 GB, depending on the benchmark.
Now Jim Handy is talking my language. Flash per dollar IS the best value for performance gain. I think if RAM chips were soldered directly to the motherboard and were sufficiently large (maybe not 1-2GB but say 4-8GB) and Flash was added as a secondary memory layer you would see some big boosts in computer performance. Look at DDR4 now, just entering the market. Performance gains from this generation are mostly aimed at retiring operations and completing tasks and going into low power sleep mode. It’s no longer about clock speeds, and registered rows and refresh cycles. It’s all about completing a read/write/flush operation and going to sleep as fast as you can to save power. Now that we’ve hit that plateau why not adopt Flash as the main memory with RAM as the 4th Level cache in principle? If people still want to upgrade/max out their RAM install, let them buy the higher end part, the enterprise data center chipset with extra sockets for DIMMs. Let the consumers have the fixed RAM allocation with RAM chips on the motherboard, and the all the DIMM sockets devoted to Flash memory instead. And with proper OS and chipset support, this revolution could happen overnight.
IBM and SanDisk tickled our imaginations and now I’m wanting to see the X6 Server tech hit the broader consumer market. While we’ll still see SSDs and PCIe SSDs for some time to come, the real revolution is still waiting to take place, Flash DIMMs for everyone. If it takes 3 years to convince motherboard manufacturers and Intel and AMD to go this route, fine let’s get the discussion going now.m Start prototyping, and sampling chipsets and Flash DIMMs today. This might be enough of a product differentiator going forward as to make a desktop computer with upgradeable Flash DIMMs a hotter product than the consumer desktop is today.
Carpet Bomberz Inc. 