[QE2]

Yes. In fact, CPU's are still increasing in performance exponentially faster than RAM or disk (hard or solid-state) storage.

Fetching something from RAM still takes hundreds of CPU cycles. Even SSD's, which are much faster than hard disks in most metrics, are orders of magnitude slower than RAM.

So yeah, this isn't happening anytime soon.

[dkersten]

MRAM(1) will bring memory latency down a good bit, if it catches on and advancements keep getting made. Its still going to lag behind the speed of processors though and the system bus will still be a general I/O bottleneck (especially if the MRAM is not on chip). SSD and MRAM may cut down the I/O latencies, but they will never eliminate them, so asynchronous/concurrent operations through lightweight threads will still be important.

He also forgets things where independent processing is desirable because it eases modeling the system which you're modeling, eg a friend used Stackless Python to code that zombie outbreak simulation and each zombie got its own green thread because it simplified the simulation.

Of course, he has a point in that the language should allow green threads to be added as a library, rather than being built in, but most languages would actually allow this. Also, Erlang may have lightweight threads, but its still SMP-aware.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoresistive_Random_Access_...