Phased Out
The recent announcement by Intel regarding advancements to phase change memory herald a profound shift in how storage and memory systems on computers will work in the near future. The use of material phase states to store data means phase change memory that will blur the necessary distinctions between long and short term memory requirements on current systems. Instead of having fast volatile RAM in systems and secondary storage for data persistence, only a single memory store will be required. The need to load data "into memory" in order to participate in computations will be rendered obsolete. Instead, all persistent data will be accessible just as easily in memory. In essence, we will have large capacity in-memory data stores. This type of memory will unify volatile/non-volatile memory rendering the distinction irrelevant. One of the obvious advantages will be the "instant on" capability of devices which use this type of memory. Computing devices will begin to behave more like appliances without the ubiquitous boot times associated with most computers today.
The long range implications of this advancement is the application of phase change materials to processors themselves. Instead of a lithographed realization of a processor on a silicon die, processors themselves will be reconfigurable to take advantage of new designs. The general purpose CPU will be replaced by processors which can behave as Field Programmable Gate Arrays. The ability to reconfigure the processor depending on the computational task will allow for more efficient execution of instructions within an execution context. Dynamic hardware parallelism will allow for computationally expensive operations to be optimized at the processor level.
Keep an eye out for advancements in material sciences which will allow this type processor morphism.
