I think we’ll still have a larger, slower chunk of memory for cos…
I think we’ll still have a larger, slower chunk of memory for cost effectiveness and redundancy for quite some time. MRAM will probably cost a lot more than the older hard drive technologies. Future computers will likely have a hard drive for larger data files, data files that don’t need to be read quickly, and backups of the couple of gigabytes of stuff on the MRAM, should, say, a stick get disconnected or need to be replaced. The MRAM will hold frequently accessed portions of the OS, frequently used programs, etc. In fact, I imagine OSX’s memory manager would probably be up to the task, since it leaves behind the memory used by recently closed applications on the RAM should you want to load the application again, saving you the time of loading it. Imagine that, but with 16 GB of RAM so that you don’t need to delete that often.
Hard drives have always been the biggest bottleneck on a computer (second to optical drives), but there’s a big reason for that: They’re cheap. SSD may get cheaper and faster, but I doubt it’ll overtake MRAM, so it might be the supplement for MRAM in say, 10 years. I just think it’d be foolish to keep absolutely everything in MRAM in the near future when a hard drive would offer a second point of failure and a ton of space.
Now for the exception which proves what I just said. Netbooks like the EEE PC would really stand to benefit from this, because they don’t need much CPU power for their tasks, have only a few settings, and need to be light. No hard drive or SSD storage would save space and power, and they store most of their data on the cloud (Or at least that’s what I understand about them). What they really need is the ability to boot up quickly and have long battery life. Should the MRAM fail for whatever reason (rogue program wipes it, the ram pops out of its socket, power surge, etc), the machine could be configured to have a memory flash mode where you plug it into another computer to have its OS and software written to the RAM, which isn’t too inconvenient as most people get these as surrogate machines.