What would happen if I had 1 terabyte of RAM?

[AL_DA_GREAT]

Ok what would happen if a RAM 1 terabyte large was invented. I only have 100 igabytes on my harddrive. Could I then theoreticaly put it all on my RAM and never have to wait for something to load?

 

[DaEezT]

Yes, as long as you don't turn out the PC or get an equally big HDD to store the content before every shutdown.

 

[warpus]

Of course you'd have to wait - you always have to wait. RAM is really really fast - but not instantenous.

 

[Turner]

This is also assuming you had a motherboard that could hold 1000 ram modules.

 

[History_Buff]

Yeah, if it was all one big chip, it wouldn't help. RAM slows down as it gets bigger. Doesn't stop me from dreaming about 2 Gb of SRAM though

 

[taper]

We'll probably see it someday. Remember when Bill Gates said that 640k was good enough for anybody?

 

[Turner]

Oh, I have no doubt we'd see it. I've got 125 times more RAM in my current computer than I had in my first...and I never thought I'd see a gig of RAM.

We're just not going to see it with the current technology. Wait ten years, and people will be complaining "I've only got 8 tb's of memory! I need more!"

 

[ainwood]

Your operating system wouldn't be able to address it all.

 

[lord_yoshi]

The second you lose power is the second you lose everthing. Think PocketPC with WM2003...

 

[taper]

Unless I'm missing something, a true 64bit OS should be able to address up to 2^64 bytes of RAM, roughly 16 exabytes. That's massive.

 

[History_Buff]

Massive, but it wouldn't run fast enough to be useful to you with our current tech levels. Vista will support 16 Gigs on it's Higher End Home Version though, which I found surprising, since I have yet to see a comp that can mount that much.

 

[taper]

It never hurts to future-proof your OS. When XP came out 256MB was standard, 512 was considered high end. As a 32 bit OS, XP can support 4 GB, which is the most you can fit in a motherboard. (coicidence? )

 

[dragokatzov]

Yeah, if it was all one big chip, it wouldn't help. RAM slows down as it gets bigger. Doesn't stop me from dreaming about 2 Gb of SRAM though

man, that would make any PC so much faster, but would cost about 20 arms and 30 legs

 

[Speedo]

The hard limit on XP/2k is 4GB, though I've heard that has some problems with >3GB. The way computers currently work, it doesn't matter how much RAM you have, as long as it's more than the OS and programs you're running require. In other words, at present the performance difference between 4GB of RAM and 1TB would be minimal - actually, with current technology 1TB would probably perform horribly, since it would have God-awful timings. I have 2GB in my comp, and I don't think I've ever seen more than about 1.3GB actually used.

The theoretical limit for a 64 bit computer is 128TB of RAM, IIRC. I'm kinda doubtful that we'll come close to that limit before the next generation (128 bit) comes about, but it's possible. I'd expect it to be at least a year or two until the enthusiast-type boards start supporting more than 4GB.