are we ready for infinitely faster RAM?

(and what would it be worth)

• Typical user installations needed more memory capacity than could be integrated by DRAM in a single box. The latency fabric from interfaces wrapped around these SSD assets negated the latency advantage of DRAM chips compared to flash chips. (The flash chips had much higher storage capacity per chip and required much less electrical power.)

• Most of the easy acceleration advantages of enterprise SSDs came from read requests rather than writes. That's just the way that the legacy installed software base worked. That bias in the profile of memory R/W meant that the asymmetic R/W latency of flash chips - with reads being orders of magnitude faster than writes - was not a serious obstacle in adoption.

• The value of an Nx faster memory-compute accelerator can indeed be measured by at least the cost of all the previous traditional hardware which was needed to solve similar problems before. So 1 new PU (TPU etc) is indeed worth Nx conventional server CPU / GPU / when there is sufficient work to be within a particular problem shape universe. Their value is application specific. (Some workloads are accelerated better than others.)

• Modern memory accelerators don't have to resemble either dumb memory or dumb processors. Provided that they can interoperate with conventional servers and infrastructure the new memory accelerators are best viewed as black boxes whose internal details may change and adapt (just like search engine algorithms) when more data suggests future areas of improvement.