Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 14th Dec 2005 14:08 UTC
Yonah, a dual-core notebook chip based on a new design, will be released in January, said Keith Kresslin, director of mobile platforms marketing at Intel. It is expected to provide around 68 percent better performance than current Intel notebook chips, which sport one processing core. Computers with Yonah will also be better than PCs today at running many applications at once, he said.
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Modern flash drives with logic to spread out writes evenly have a reliability rating comperable to, if not better than mechanical magnetic drives and offer some benefits such as faster, uniform seek times, quick access, and fast sustained writes.
The real issue against flash is cost. IIRC, the 4gb nano's flash costs apple ~48$. Lets assume that advances in technology have halved that number. Thats 6$ per gigabyte. 40, 60, and 80 gig drives would cost 240, 360, and 480 USD respectively in flash components alone, tack on another 60 to manufacture a drive based on this and you have 300-540 USD for a drive. Now, thats not exactly rediculously expensive, but a similar magnetic drive would run 50-100 USD or even less.
A flash drive is also a poor choice for a ram drive, as writes are more frequent than traditional disk use. I said above that flash is as reliable as a magnetic drive, but thats no reason to press your luck either. An ideal "RAM drive" would be exactly that, RAM with an IDE interface. Now, if you meant something more like a system drive (stores OS/Applications, has no swap/ram-drive) then I'd agree with you, but you'd still need a magnetic drive for the bulk of your storage.
Large, cheap flash drives are coming, but they're not here yet.