Computer RAM gets biggest upgrade in 25 years but it may be too little, too late — LPCAMM2 won’t stop Apple, Intel and AMD from integrating memory directly on the CPU::LPCAMM2 is a revolution in RAM, but it faces an uphill struggle
Computer RAM gets biggest upgrade in 25 years but it may be too little, too late — LPCAMM2 won’t stop Apple, Intel and AMD from integrating memory directly on the CPU::LPCAMM2 is a revolution in RAM, but it faces an uphill struggle
RAM is basically the scratch space for the CPU. It doesn’t just contain data loaded from the SSD, it contains the running state of the OS and all applications and is constantly being read from and written to by the CPU. As it is, RAM is already a lot slower than the CPU. Replacing RAM with a standard NVMe SSD would slow a PC down to an unusable crawl.
I’m familiar with what RAM is for.
The idea I’m getting at is, back in the day computer software especially video games came on ROM cartridges, which were little more than a plastic shell around a small circuit board that had a ROM chip or two, maybe a battery backed RAM chip to save game progress if you’re Nintendo. This ROM was attached to the same data bus on the CPU as the system’s built-in RAM, which meant the CPU could read from it just like RAM. This meant that cartridge-based systems didn’t need as much total RAM, because instructions, graphics, audio etc. were read directly from ROM, and it didn’t have to load instructions or graphics into memory before executing/displaying them. So no loading screens.
Modern computer SSDs are attached via SATA or at best the PCIe bus, and the CPU has to interact with a controller on the device to get data loaded into memory before it can be executed. Could you attach some non-volatile storage on the same bus with the RAM. Like, the average ATX motherboard has 4 RAM slots, right? Could you mount two sticks of RAM and two sticks of non-volatile storage that exists in the memory address space?
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