Ps5 131gb Ram

[JustBeingReal]

JEMC said:

Pemalite said:

JEMC said:

@Pemalite : I know it's possible to squeeze that much memory on the next consoles, but will it be worth it? After all, they aren't really PCs but a mix of a console with a multimedia player, and their multitasking capabilities won't improve that much compared to what they can do right now. I don't see what they could use that much RAM, honestly, unless they load the whole game into the RAM.

 

As for new NAND that replaces both the need for separated HDD/SSD and RAM, that would be interesting... but will it be cost effective even whenever the next consoles launch?

Will it be worth it? Well. It really depends on the rest of the hardware really and the cost/benefit, no point loading a system up with Ram if you can't make use of that much memory. (GPU's and CPU performance development is slowing down in the PC space, which will affect next-gen.)
If Sony/Microsoft can throw in a faster Graphics Chip at the expensive of memory capacity, they would probably do so, 8Gb of Ram is fantastic right now in regards to cost/capacity, which is why these consoles wen't with that capacity. (Amongst other things.)

The big benefit though will come with Multi-Tasking, ever used Windows when it's loaded into a RAM drive? It's freaking nuts, you feel like superman on crack.


As for NAND, TLC NAND is especially cost effective, it's not able to be competitive with Optical Discs and Hard Drives in terms of size/cost ratio's just yet, but it's been making rapid progress over the few years.
NAND can also take advantage of really low fabrication nodes, because of how simple it is to make relative to a hand-designed processor.

I remember just a few years ago, picking up an OCZ SSD, that was 64Gb in size and cost me about $150.
Today, I can get an SSD 4x as large, for less, give it a console generation and see how things stack up. :P

No, I haven't used a computer with a RAM drive. But I loved your analogy!

 

As for NAND evolution, let me start saying that I don't know much about it, but if I'm not wrong they are already producing it at 20nm and with the troubles everybody (even Intel) are having to go below that point, I don't see them going beyond 14nm once next gen launches. Also NAND is still not as fast as RAM, so they still have work to do on that front.

And on top of that, even though TLC NAND is here and cheap enough, its lifespan is also lower than "regular" NAND and that is something of concern if you plan to go into smaller nodes, which will shorten its life even more, and try to use it also as RAM memory, which will dramatically increase its write-read operations shortening again its lifespan.

I'm afraid there's still a lot of work until we reach that point, even less when its affordable enough to use it on consoles.

I posted this in a comment about a page or 2 back: http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/storage/how-universal-memory-will-replace-dram-flash-and-ssds-1222632

The technologies mentioned in this article could allow for 1000X the speed of NAND (which I believe is currently around 300MB/s), with more storage life to the data, potentially could be a reality by 2018, so maybe PS5 could go into production around that time and we could see standard RAM being replaced by Solid State Drives with better speed than the best DDR3 today. The only issues beyond the usual changes to different technologies may be the latency, although it's still in the nanoseconds according to Crossbar (one of the companies developing RRAM).

Apparently Crossbar's RRAM can be made using today's fabrication plants, so we may see it go into production in the next few years.

 

RRAM seems to be a much better solution than NAND because it's better in practically every category from latency, to bandwidth to density.

Apparently a 1TB module of RRAM was about 1/2 the size of a NAND Flash module, that was written about in this article from last year: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2484798/emerging-technology/memory-wars--rram-vs--3d-nand-flash--and-the-winner-is---us.html

 

To get an idea of the kind of speed RRAM can offer this part of the article can give a good indication of what's possible:

"When it comes to performance, RRAM brings yet another advantage. A NAND flash chip today has about 7MB/sec write speeds. SSDs and flash cards can achieve 400MB/sec speeds by running multiple chips in parallel.

A RRAM chip boasts 140MB/sec write speeds, and that's without parallel interconnects to multiple chips, Minassian said."

That's only a single chip though, not a module, which I believe is multiple chips stacked either on top of each other or flipped on their sides and placed next to each other, side-by-side.

What's written in that article sound very promising.

 

The best thing about the potential of using RRAM is that it would actually reduce a stage of the manufacturing process because rather than having to stick a bunch of RAM chips on the motherboard the production facility would just have to install what is basically an SSD, that then acts as RAM and storage.

Apparently production facilities are already outfitted to make it and it's inexpensive, may only cost a few million dollars in engineering costs to introduce to plants.

According to the Techradar article Crossbar says it hopes to get RRAM to market next year. I think that probably means servers would start using it first and then over the years it will trickle down to the PC market. If Crossbar's RRAM goes into production by 2015, we could see the technology evolve to even greater levels of performance by the time Sony starts to produce PS5 or maybe an even faster kind of solid state storage.