Replacing your DRAM sticks every five years may be okay, but what about for boards with soldered on memory?
(you may need to adjust the volume, the audio is 5 LU below reference)
For example: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu4323
The implication is that it can theoretically hold a value for 10^14s (~3 million years).
DRAM kind of plateaued in 2011, when it hit $4/GB; since then it's gotten faster and bigger, but not appreciably cheaper per bit.
This could change if there was a way to do 3D DRAM, like 3D NAND flash, but that doesn't appear to be on the table at present. Note that this isn't the "stacking" they talk about with IGZO-DRAM, where they build layers on top of each other - it's not 3D stacking itself that made flash cheap.
Flash got insanely cheap because of the single-pass 3D architecture - it's pretty cheap to put a large number (~400 nowadays) of featureless layers onto a chip, then you drill precise holes through all the layers and coat the inside of the hole with the right stuff, turning each hole into a stack of ~400 flash cells.
The cost of a wafer (and thus a chip) is proportional to the time it spends in the ultra-expensive part of the fab. 3D NAND puts maybe 100x as many cells onto a wafer as the old planar flash (you can't pack those holes as closely as the old cells), but what's important is that the wafer only spends maybe 2x as long (I'm totally guessing here) in the fab. If it took 100x as long, laying down a few hundred layers, the price advantage would vanish.
Five year lifetime isn't getting anywhere near my setup. Also notably absent was anything about read or write times. It sounded promising all the way up to that last paragraph.
ksec•4h ago
We could have higher capacity, faster and most importantly far more energy efficient DRAM.