Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-ncis!oodis01!uplherc!esunix!bpendlet
From: bpendlet@esunix.UUCP (Bob Pendleton)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Solid State Secondary Storage
Message-ID: <1178@esunix.UUCP>
Date: 9 Jan 89 15:06:59 GMT
References: <248@vlsi.ll.mit.edu>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Evans & Sutherland, Salt Lake City, Utah
Lines: 31

From article <248@vlsi.ll.mit.edu>, by young@vlsi.ll.mit.edu (George Young):
> 
> Our wafer scale integration group is considering developing a new kind
> of computer memory unit -- something we hope might fill in the present
> gap in memory speed and price between magnetic disk and ram.

...

> Sound like heaven?  Well, the catch is speed.  In order to get very high
> density and cheap fabrication, various sacrifices are made resulting in 
> access time of maybe ~10 microseconds.  So we are left with a box that is:

So you do away with seeks and rotational latency, but give a transfer
rate about the same, or maybe a bit slower, than a high performance
disk? Very nice.


> What if we could put a little matching circuit on each wafer to support
> context addressable usage?  What other sort of additional (small) circuits
> would be useful in such a beast?

Take a look at Lee Hollars' work on large textual database search.
Build these ram disks with a few pattern matchers per wafer, stack up
50 to 100 gigabytes worth, and you could have a killer text search
machine.

			Bob P.
-- 
              Bob Pendleton, speaking only for myself.
UUCP Address:  decwrl!esunix!bpendlet or utah-cs!esunix!bpendlet

		Reality is what you make of it.