[quote author=“Drachen”]Retail, the 1GB part is about $400. No laptop maker would add something that expensive to a non-premium (like X505-class) consumer model. Remember that Sony decided we didn’t need that BT module in the US TR. The 4GB models cost retail about as much as my first car did.
Give it another 2 years…mark my words…hard drives are going bye-bye in the mainstream PC’s. They will hang around as external storage / back up. Flash memory will also be quickly replacing Mini DV in camcorders.
I agree that non-volatile flash RAM will be much more prevalent but I think it’s more like 5 (unlikely) to 10 years (more likely if even that).
Look at the gap between flash and hard disk right now. 4GB…well, maybe 8GB tops commercially. Hard disks are at 500GB with indication that we’ll be at 1TB by the end of next year. And an 8GB flash chip costs a heck of a lot more than a 500GB hard disk.
Of course, I wouldn’t mind if it showed up earlier…however, until they get the price down to reasonable levels it won’t be mainstream for a while. We’ll see how the supply/demand ends up. Of course, most consumers will need to be educated to understand why they should get flash ram drives. Maybe Intel can help this and perpetuate their “oh, it will make your Internet faster” or by then “it will make your optical processors run better”.
[quote author=“TruthSeeker”]Give it another 2 years…mark my words…hard drives are going bye-bye in the mainstream PC’s. They will hang around as external storage / back up. Flash memory will also be quickly replacing Mini DV in camcorders.
Better buy Flash Ram stock now!!
Unlikely. Flash is much slower than volitile memory, so you wouldn’t want to use it as RAM. The other thing, as gr00vy mentioned is that HD capacities are exploding. Compare the price of the 4GB iPod Mini (a HD with a full-functional MP3 player + the “Apple Tax”) with the 4GB flash-based CF cards. I was able to add a 1.4GB SAN (RAID 5) to our network for about $6k. That was the price of a low-end server a few years ago. And if you’re worried about speed, check out a machine with SCSI Ultra 320 15k RPM drives.
I was thinking from the perspective of eliminating mechanical parts which draws less heat and energy. This may help to better achieve the all day battery we all want like we have on cell phones now. If they got Flash up to 20-30 GB (reasonably priced of course), I would use it as my main hard disk and use an external drive with HUGE storage capacities for data.
So the obvious benefit is less heat, which indirectly helps the CPU, and increased battery times through a significant reduction in power draw. Do you think this scenario will take longer than 2-3 years? I cannot imagine how it would take 10 years, unless big companies like Intel were not behind it with media exposure.
[quote author=“Drachen”][quote author=“TruthSeeker”]Just wait until they replace Hard drives with Flash Ram…you could still have XP and the instant on feature, could you not?
Yeah. Those are right around the corner…
it doesn’t have to be the whole harddrive maybe a flash bios to store the windows state and return to the last state instantly. That would be almost instant on.
I thought COMPAQ did something like that at one time.
The “instant on” feature would be very attractive to the consumer. They could tweak future versions of Windows to accomodate this feature. the PC industry is always looking for new ways to boost sales through the latest and greatest marketing idea.
[quote author=“TruthSeeker”]The “instant on” feature would be very attractive to the consumer. They could tweak future versions of Windows to accomodate this feature. the PC industry is always looking for new ways to boost sales through the latest and greatest marketing idea.
I agree 100% but it won’t happen on current OS types, a new type would need to be written. Like WindowsCE but much more functional, like XP.
Yeah, although all these companies keep talking about initiatives for Instant On computing we’re not going to see it for a while. And the next Windows OS (aka Longhorn) won’t really have the capability either.
OS aside, you’re going to need extremely fast non-volatile memory just to store the system states and you’re going to need components that can handle instant on with properly written drivers.
Standby mode is the closest you’re going to get right now which isn’t too bad. It’s “nearly instant on”.
