DRAM latencies are pretty heinous. It makes me wonder if the memory industry will go through a similar transition to the storage industry's HDD->SSD sometime in the not too distant future.
I wonder about the practicalities of going to SRAM for main memory. I doubt silicon real estate would be the limiting factor (1T1C to 6T, isn't it?) and Apple charges a king's ransom for RAM anyway. Power might be a problem though. Does anyone have figures for SRAM power consumption on modern processes?
>> I wonder about the practicalities of going to SRAM for main memory. I doubt silicon real estate would be the limiting factor (1T1C to 6T, isn't it?) and Apple charges a king's ransom for RAM anyway. Power might be a problem though. Does anyone have figures for SRAM power consumption on modern processes?
I've been wondering about this for years. Assuming the difference is similar to the old days, I'd take 2-4GB of SRAM over 32GB of DRAM any day. Last time this came up people claimed SRAM power consumption would be prohibitive, but I have a hard time seeing that given these 50B transistor chips running at several GHz. Most of the transistors in an SRAM are not switching, so they should be optimized for leakage and they'd still be way faster than DRAM.
I wonder about the practicalities of going to SRAM for main memory. I doubt silicon real estate would be the limiting factor (1T1C to 6T, isn't it?) and Apple charges a king's ransom for RAM anyway. Power might be a problem though. Does anyone have figures for SRAM power consumption on modern processes?