In July 2015 Intel and Micron announced a new type of non-volatile memory: 3D XPoints (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint). Although introduction into the market is several years away and the initial (affordable?) version will probably won't manage to fullfill the performance promise of being "1000x faster then flash", it is interesting to paint a world in which we can use (large) non-volatile storage (our disks) as a replacement for RAM.<p>How would database technologies change? Would we still need caching mechanisms? Do OS's still need page swapping? Would this turn over the HPC industry and deprecate years of work on optimizations?
Intel today announced SPDK (DPDK for storage), which provides IO operations in userspace.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10263200" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10263200</a>