Originally posted by: oldman420
Given that hdds are among the biggest bottlenecks in todays PC, and the fact that solid state storage is getting faster and faster would it be possible in the future to have the OS stored right on board?
I mean some sort of high speed programmable ic chip. it seems to me that if you could place the OS on a chip the system would run much faster.
Any thoughts?
I don't think hard drives are as big of a bottleneck as you're implying. Sure, they're orders of magnitude slower than DRAM, which is orders of magnitude slower than SRAM, but that's why computers have memory hierarchies. By having the smaller, faster memory closer to the cpu, and the slower, bigger memory further away, and by intelligently moving data that you are likely to need in the near future (using the principle of locality), the small, fast memory can really do quite a good job of masking the fact that the hdd is so slow. In other words, even though you could in theory have a large solid state memory structure to replace a hdd, you'd lose many orders of magnitude in storage capability (assuming you keep the cost the same...if you keep the storage size the same, you'd see many orders of magnitude increase in cost), and the real increase in speed/performance would be rather small. So, as long as there is such a large discrepency in cost-to-performance ratio of various types of memory/storage devices, memory hierarchy is the way to go for 99.9% of computer users.