MetaRAM - Who needs MetaRAM?
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You won't be seeing this memory in a computer near you any time soon if ever, and I'm leaning toward the "ever" part. There are two big reasons you won't see it in consumer PCs. The first reason is that there are very very few people that need 16+ GB of RAM now. Even with dual quad cores, quad video cards, playing intensive games or running high end video editing software, you would be fine with 4-8 GB.
The other issue you run into is physical barriers. I explained earlier that the built in chipset breaks the memory down into small sizes for the memory controller to handle. Any X86 (32 bit) programs can only handle 4 GB RAM (3.2 GB available due to 1 GB ≠ 1,000 MB); it's a hardware issue and no real way to get around it. When we go up to 64 bit, the potential available memory is over 17,000 TB.
I don't think we'll hit that mark for a while. The problem is 99 percent of PCs being sold are still 32-bit. There are 64-bit versions of all the Vistas, but manufacturers are still sticking to 32-bit. Most consumers are going to be limited by this, which will kill any hopes of a 4+ GB system.
The market here is mainframes and servers. Most servers are running or should be switching at their next upgrade to 64-bit operating systems. This will eliminate the physical barrier with getting over 4 GB.
Keep in mind, though, that this isn't for a small network of a few hundred or thousand computers. We are talking about companies such as Microsoft or Wal-Mart that have hundreds of thousands of PCs. Such a network will use as much memory as it can get its hands on, and its visitors will make it eat RAM for breakfast.
Indeed, some websites really get pounded. Let's look at Amazon.com, for example. On December 10, 2007, at the height of the holiday season, Amazon had to deal with 5.4 million items; that's 62.5 items per second. Do you think they could live with a server with 4 GB RAM?
Next: Conclusion >>
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