[Info-vax] Storage is faster than the processor

[John E. Malmberg]

On 1/6/2016 2:24 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>
> Having storage that is faster than the processors renders more than a
> few system and application design details obsolete.

Could even be considered a blast from the past.

A MicroVAX II with third party ESDI MSCP controller has faster storage 
than the CPU.

The DMA controller could move the data about 3X faster than the CPU 
could use it.  Which means that VM could be paged in without visible CPU 
pause if you have your system tuned correctly.

The big shift is that using parallel lines to increase throughput as was 
done in the past hit a hard wall in that amount of induced noise.

Once chips were able to handle serial data transfers in the Ghz/10 Ghz 
and higher ranges, it totally changed what is practical to implement, 
and getting rid of the parallel paths frees up real-estate.

SSD technology got rid of rotational latency and is not fragile.

Which allowed systems to shrink to the size of phones and such, and that 
volume helped fuel the technology race.

This makes replication look awful cheap until you need to try to make 
sure all copies are in sync.

Regards,
-John
wb8tyw at qsl.network