Computer Memory Can Be Read With a Flash of Light

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Uhm, Flash is orders of magnitude slower than DRAM, which is orders of magnitude slower then SRAM.

SRAM is on chip because its expensive and its interface is expensive so you'd waste a lot of money and effort to have a SRAM discreet component on the other side of the mobo. Designing an interconnect to put the L1/L2 cache in an external chip is a REAL PITA by itself for consumer devices.

Looks like modern SLC NAND goes at roughly 100ns access times.

DDR3 - 2000 has a 9ns access time.

That DDR3 is roughly on par with the SRAM cache on my old 486, which was about 10ns. I have no clue what the internal L1 latency is on something like an i7, but considering that the MHZ is a couple orders a few orders of magnitude higher, I can assume its off the scale faster in comparison to NAND.

NAND is fast compared to a slow spinning platter disk that has to move a head and a platter into the right position to even get started. Its not really fast otherwise unless you do massively parallel reads. NAND has to do parallel (multiple chips) reads just to keep up with current SATA speeds. The interface isn't the issue.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/bUfveVFYIc8/story01.htm

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