system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is the future of computer hardware?

Processors will be faster, storage will be bigger and so on. But I'm not talking about that, I mean what will be a leap in computing? Do we see a hypothetical future where storage has become so fast that RAM no longer exists as a component? How do future file systems work?
gpt
No one can really speak to the far off future because the future of computing likely relies on knowledge that literally doesn't exist right now. But as far as the near-ish (5-10 years) future goes:

Processors aren't likely to be that much faster. For years now, we've relied on just improving things like branch prediction, parallelism, etc. to increase the power of our CPUs but changes like those are riddled with limitations. We can't make them faster (as far as clock speed) because then they become impossible to cool. We could cool them if we could make them larger, but the speed of light is a huge bottleneck (thus why chips keep getting smaller because then the light has a shorter distance to travel) and that speed limit is never going to change.

>Do we see a hypothetical future where storage has become so fast that RAM no longer exists as a component?

No. Our fast storage right now is with SSDs but SSDs have a limited number of writes that they can perform. Program memory is *constantly* being read/written (millions or billions of times per second) and would kill an SSD immediately. Further, an SSD will never be as fast as RAM because as their speed/bandwidth increase, the speed/bandwidth of RAM is increasing too (which has advantages in speed that an SSD, by definition, can't have).

Power consumption is something that is getting better in a hurry thanks to the demand and rapid turnover of cell phones, so that's something we can probably expect though.