Ask Slashdot: Is the Gap Between Data Access Speeds Widening Or Narrowing?

New submitter DidgetMaster writes: Everyone knows that CPU registers are much faster than level1, level2, and level3 caches. Likewise, those caches are much faster than RAM; and RAM in turn is much faster than disk (even SSD). But the past 30 years have seen tremendous improvements in data access speeds at all these levels. RAM today is much, much faster than RAM 10, 20, or 30 years ago. Disk accesses are also tremendously faster than previously as steady improvements in hard drive technology and the even more impressive gains in flash memory have occurred. Is the 'gap' between the fastest RAM and the fastest disks bigger or smaller now than the gap was 10 or 20 years ago? Are the gaps between all the various levels getting bigger or smaller? Anyone know of a definitive source that tracks these gaps over time?

Comments

RAM latency is not getting much faster

[hkultala]

The latency of RAM is improving very slowly, only something like 2x-4x improvement in last 20 years.

Only the bandwidth of the memory is growing faster, and that's just because they have been putting more dram cells in parallel, always doing bigger data transfers and having faster memory bus.

Same is true for hard disk drive speed, the rotation speeds dictates the random access latency and the rotation speed of average hard disk has only gone up from 4200 or 5400 to 7200 rpm in the last 20 years, meaning only 1.7 or 1.33 times improvement in random access latency

  Though replacing hard disks with flash-based SSD storage has improved latency by a huge margin.