A Trip Down Memory Lane: Reflections on the progress in memories

Since their introduction 75 years ago, transistors have fundamentally changed how humans compute, generate, and store data. On the compute side, the world has witnessed a staggering growth in performance, with supercomputers consistently doubling record performances approximately every 1.2 years over the past three decades [1] . This unrelenting growth reached a new milestone in 2022 when the Frontier supercomputer surpassed the exaflop barrier in May, computing more than 1.1 billion billion operations per second. In an Oak Ridge National Laboratory press release at the time, it was described as “if each person on earth completed one calculation per second, it would take more than four years to do what an exascale computer can do in one second” [2] . The acceleration in compute is accompanied by a similarly staggering growth in storage, with the world’s total storage projected to exceed 175 ZB by 2025. To also put this number into perspective, IDC remarked that, if 175 ZB of data were stored on DVDs, the stack of DVDs could reach the moon 23 times [3] .