Is ram still relevant?

Mind you, I do know a bit about computers but I'm not the most technically knowledgeable person by any means. I'm wondering since most people don't recommend more then 4 gigs for personal use really is there a possibility ram may not be a relevant part of consumer computers in the near future? I mean, is random access memory really useful when PCI-E SSD drives come out with read/write speeds that top 1gbps and are viably priced for standard consumer desktops and even notebooks? Doesn't ram just act as high speed temporary space? When I 256gb or higher PCI-E drive is available at 1gbps what real bottlenecks would a computer with one have with no ram compared to one which does have ram?

 

Reason we have RAM is because it has near infinite read and write cycles, as well as being a lot faster (DDR3 and even DDR2 is still a lot faster than some SSD's and near hundreds of times fasters than HDD's). Computers need instant access to be fast, so hard drives don't fit, and SSD's don't have the lifespan to keep up with the millions of writes they would see from use as RAM.

As for wether or not people need more than 4GB, not really. If you need more than that you'll know

 

Interesting, it seems as PCI-E drives mature and get faster they serve most of the purposes you stated however. Are unlimited read and write cycles really that important? I would imagine a mature pci-e ssd would have absurd life spans beyond the other parts of your computer anyway.

 

SSD lifespan is one of those things that is dependent on use, and if you try using one as RAM, I wouldn't expect it to last longer than a few months, unless the business side of SSD's have furthered tech that's too expensive for consumers to even see.

 

First rule of computers: CPU's do the 'work' in RAM. Not on a storage subsystem.

RAM will never be irrelevant in how todays processors function - they are an integral part of the cpu where the work is performed.

Will storage devices become as fast and dependable as RAM someday? No doubt.

But storage subsystems cannot/will not be used in place of RAM today (nor in the foreseeable future) because of cost, speed, dependability and security reasons (SSD's don't loose their data when turned off - RAM does - can you image 'RAM theft' as a new way of gaining a competitive advantage over your industry?).

RAM is not only high speed temporary space - it is the processor's exclusive play area. With an storage based SSD - no matter how fast it is - a user can save/place files there as they please - we can't do that with RAM; it is the processors/OS's sole domain.

Even if you could get an affordable 8GB SSD that was RAM fast right now in reads - the writes will still be in the HDD range and would cripple the user experience back to 1950's levels of computing (think punch cards fed by hand slow...). Worse, it would likely last all of a week or two with current SSD tech.

So yeah, RAM is still very, very relevant - SSD's just confuse the issue because they are also based on seemingly similar nand chips.

 

I see, great information there. So its unlikely we'll see SSD's being used as ram atleast not in the foreseeable future?

 

Ram = i7 1366
SSD = PCI express REVO

SSD = 500ish MB/sec
Ram = 14000 MB/sec

SSD = 100000 ns
Ram = 40 ns

Even if lifetime issues were sorted, the above really details the difference.

 

Can SSD's even be used the way RAM is? Can you store variables and byte code onto SSDs? I don't know, I guess you could.

RAM is still just way faster than any SSD's and by teh time SSD's get as fast as our current RAM is (if ever) we'll have moved on to even faster RAM.

 

No. The very idea is ludicrous. In addition to the data posted above, this is also about random access to individual storage locations at the word level (4 or 8 bytes apiece for 32/64-bit machines, respectively). No SSD comes even remotely close to the performance of RAM in that area.

Finally, no, RAM is not just for "temporary storage", and the functionality of RAM is not duplicated by mass storage media of any kind.

No, not in any practical way. Mass storage devices read and write blocks of data at a much coarser level of granularity than what is required of RAM-based operations. See above.