Re: Interesting read on SCM upending software and hardware architecture

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 12:31 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> <rant>People keep predicting the death of spinning media, but I think
> it's not happening to anywhere near as fast as that people think.
> Yes, I'm writing this on a laptop with an SSD, and my personal laptop
> also has an SSD, but their immediate predecessors did not, and these
> are fairly expensive laptops.  And most customers I talk to are still
> using spinning disks.  Meanwhile, main memory is getting so large that
> even pretty significant databases can be entirely RAM-cached.  So I
> tend to think that this is a lot less exciting than people who are not
> me seem to think.</rant>

I tend to agree that the case for SSDs as a revolutionary technology
has been significantly overstated. This recent article makes some
interesting points:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/what-we-learned-about-ssds-in-2015/

I think it's much more true that main memory scaling (in particular,
main memory capacity) has had a huge impact, but that trend appears to
now be stalling.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan