There are a couple of issues that may address this in the not-too-distant future:
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The long history of Moore’s Law has crippled computer science by throwing hardware at software problems rather than permitting long-ago-abandoned but superior directions in software to emerge. This is related to The Hardware Lottery problem. I don’t know what adjective to use to describe people who say lack of interest in the Hutter Prize is due to the resource limit Marcus is sticking with. Even worse are those who don’t understand why I suggested that Ray Ozzie, upon taking over from Gates, hold an internal competition whereby the MS software suite be reduced to the smallest install size binary – because at least those guys don’t have the “limited hardware” to complain about. And what in the hell is up with academia? Oh, well, never mind…
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Even though even on-chip DRAM latency is slower than SRAM, it is still a LOT faster than going off chip even for SRAM. There are enormous strides to be made here – especially since bandwidth is the same for DRAM and SRAM once latency is amortized. That’s the point of my dream* of stuffing the SOC with interleaved DRAM banks even if that means limiting SRAM real estate to something like the Cray-1 registers.
* I fully recognize the high risk of that dream given the need for mixed signal circuitry being central to its DRAM bank mutual exclusion between different CPUs. It’s such a wild idea that, in some respects, it may be up there with overcoming the meta-Hardware Lottery and transitioning the industry to GaAs. So I can’t get any mixed signal experts to even offer an opinion on it. However, there may be light at the end of the “tunnel” so to speak: The same guy that drew my attention to a formula that resolves the proton radius puzzle happens to be a mixed signal expert.