alt Hacker NewsI don't see how any amount of memory technology can overcome the physical realities of locality. The closer you want the data to be to your processor, the less space you'll have to fit it. So there will always be a hierarchy where a smaller amount of data can have less latency, and there will always be an advantage to cramming as much data as you can at the top of the hierarchy.
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«Memory technology» as in «a single tech» that blends RAM and disk into just «memory» and obviates the need for the disk as a distinct concept.
One can conjure up RAM, which has become exabytes large and which does not lose data after a system shutdown. Everything is local in such a unified memory model, is promptly available to and directly addressable by the CPU.
Please do note that multi-level CPU caches still do have their places in this scenario.
In fact, this has been successfully done in the AS/400 (or i Series), which I have mentioned elsewhere in the thread. It works well and is highly performant.
while that's true, CPUs already have automatically managed caches. it's not too much of a stretch to imagine a world in which RAM is automatically managed as well and you don't have a distinction between RAM and persistent storage. in a spinning rust world, that never would have been possible, but with modern nvme, it's plausible.