Looking forward to it.
But strangely, more for digital cameras than anything else...
VCs are funding resistive RAM startup Spin Transfer Technologies to the tune of 36 million greenbacks so it can start creating its universal memory – combining DRAM speed, flash non-volatility, and breaking NAND scaling limits. Spin Transfer Technologies (STT) was actually started in 2007 by New York University and Allied …
If this is non-volatile yet as fast as DRAM - then it'll replace system memory and SDDs. In fact there won't be much point in having system ram, because ram and disk will have become the same thing - there will be no difference between physical memory and the swap file.
If that happens, how the hell will it work? You'd be saving your data to memory, and applications will be using the same memory as usual - not the way current systems are designed to work at all. Plus you'd run the risk of an errant program spewing garbage all over your work. Major OS redesigns needed I suspect!
not sure its going to replace HDDs right now - given that you can get a couple of TB for £50 these days. The point of swap has always been to use cheap slow store to supliment the faster memory. Effectively its just a form of caching - just like the cache on the CPU or on a disk controller.