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Persistent memory (MRAM, FERAM, and ReRAM) to replace DRAM, but it could take a decade
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2024
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So could it be plausible one day to run a RAM-less computer? If persistent memory speed matched DRAM speed, would there still be a benefit to distinguishing RAM from SSD, beyond cost?
MRAM, FeRAM, and ReRAM all have a limited number of write cycles. It's certainly possible that the write endurance will be high enough that it doesn't matter by the time it can replace DRAM in a computer though.
Density would be a factor as well for both cost and device dimension/weight.
Cache is way faster than RAM, but it takes up too much die space and power to be the only volatile memory.
The ultimate goal of persistent RAM endeavours is to build all-RAM computers. You have all your storage and RAM in one. Would eliminate most loading and boot times, if just the density was high enough (actually is for some small, embedded devices)
That's just semantics though. That's exactly what I meant. No separation of RAM and storage.
I called it RAM-less, rather than all-RAM, because we already have the concept of virtual RAM on storage. So you could have your files in a file structure and your volatile memory in a virtual RAM file. And you wouldn't necessarily even need to load files or programs into virtual RAM if you were only reading them, you could have a strict file pointer.