Re:Intel's roadmap for Optane SSDs with 1,000x performance
by yourapostasy on Tuesday June 14, 2016 @11:35AM
(#11902675)
That's almost a weird amalgam of really old school computer architectures and new.
It seemed to me from the layperson descriptions of how the old tube-based systems were operated, some of the old architectures had no notion of files at all, it was all RAM all the time. I also read stories of when rotating media first started being used, programmers wrote data not sequentially on the media but in an optimized pattern so by the time the cpu pulled a value into RAM the read head was positioned multiple units over, and so data was written out according to the demands of the hardware, and now we're talking about taking the cpu out of most of the loop.
We aren't coming full circle with the new memory architectures we're exploring, but kind of a spiral in a "history doesn't repeat but rhymes" manner by dusting off some old techniques and putting new spins on them, pun not intended.
If always-persistent state becomes popular, then I wonder if that will revive the popularity of image-based environments, a la Smalltalk and Lisp Machines, along with the collaboration challenges those introduced.
It seemed to me from the layperson descriptions of how the old tube-based systems were operated, some of the old architectures had no notion of files at all, it was all RAM all the time. I also read stories of when rotating media first started being used, programmers wrote data not sequentially on the media but in an optimized pattern so by the time the cpu pulled a value into RAM the read head was positioned multiple units over, and so data was written out according to the demands of the hardware, and now we're talking about taking the cpu out of most of the loop.
We aren't coming full circle with the new memory architectures we're exploring, but kind of a spiral in a "history doesn't repeat but rhymes" manner by dusting off some old techniques and putting new spins on them, pun not intended.
If always-persistent state becomes popular, then I wonder if that will revive the popularity of image-based environments, a la Smalltalk and Lisp Machines, along with the collaboration challenges those introduced.