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Thanks For the Memories: Touring the Awesome Random Access of Old (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: The RAM we use today is truly amazing in all respects: performance, reliability, price; all have been optimized to the point you can consider memory a solved problem. Equally fascinating is the meandering path that we've taken over the last half century to get here. Drums, tubes, mercury delay lines, dekatrons, and core memory. They're still as interesting as the day electrons first ran through their circuits. Perhaps most amazing is the cost and complexity, both of which make you wonder how they ever manage to be used in production machines. But here's the clincher: despite being difficult and costly to manufacture, they were all very reliable.
I suspect we may be nearing the end of DRAM, though only time will tell. DRAM is old and really a bottleneck these days, something is likely going to replace it. At the very least in the next few years the form factors will change from DIMMs to perhaps HBM stacked on-die and fiberoptic DIMMs. At least that would be my next guess, anyway.
Are you fucking kidding me? RAM is the SLOWEST part of the entire execution chain, and it's ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE slower than even the slowest CPU cache.
Memory busses are horribly inefficient, slow, and subject to data corruption without taking extensive measures to prevent them (which slow them down even more).
Even assuming we use the entire ~12MB of L3 cache as instruction cache (which is impossible really unless those instructions don't require any data access, which is utterly implausible), any modern CPU can blow through that in much less time than it takes a DDRx memory controller to set up a RAS.
The one and only thing slower than memory access is disk access, and even there we are closing the gap. Memory has not gotten appreciably faster in a decade, unless of course you ask marketing people.
This is literally the stupidest thing I've seen posted on Slashdot in a long time, since at least yesterday!