| Persistent dara structures? Well yes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There other scenarios like powerful real-time analytics that could benefit from 100TB of RAM immediately. 100TB systems at RAM speeds are theoretically possible without this new memory. For,example 64-bit systems could easily provide enough address space. The problem is practically speaking, server systems limit address bit capabilities quite often. And other problems still remain, not the least of which is the crazy price for 100TB of DDR4,physical slots, etc. The price would be crazy even for most enterprise projects. So yes this new generation of memory will be disruptive, but also keep in mind even though it’s faster than SSDs, that’s not nearly enough. I’m not positive, but IIRC correctly it’s still 2 or 3 orders of magnitude slower than conventional memory. Does that mean this new wave od persistent RAM it’s not useful and awesome? Not at all, I’ve already started using it. But it does mean it’s still at the stage where you have to analyze your scenarios carefully, see if it’s a good for your architecture and environment, and benchmark your particular stack to verify assumptions and make sure it’s help you the best way it can. |
Spark already works nicely with 100+TB datasets, and those can sit in memory across a thousand spot instances. Technology like tidalscale's hyperkernel can also merge together multiple systems into a single addressable memory space at the OS level so that you can run non-distributed applications across multiple commodity machines (like a reverse VM).
If 3d xpoint can give competitive price and speeds to tradional DRAM, then it will have a place in the market. Nobody has seen pricing yet nor benchmarks for these. For Intel however, this could increase their component share from CPU/chipset/network/storage to also include memory. That is pretty compelling since it's a market they haven't monetizes (not counting memory controllers) since the early days of Intel.