nycdotnet (1/18/2013)
...Full HD video is something like 10GB/hr - Let's say in the future we have Quad HD (2160p) 60 FPS 3D movies, that's 160 GB per hour or 320 GB per movie on average (with movies trending longer). Is there any practical purpose to be able to cache six such movies in RAM on a worstation especially considering that network pipes and local storage speeds will also be expanding over time?
Yes.
network pipes expand greatly in some places, not others. The same for bandwidth. I live in a rural county. Most of us have DSL, satellite, something around a 1Mbps downstream speed. There isn't a reason for anyone to invest more. Even cellular isn't great. Huge sections of the country are like this and unless there is some government push/incentive/regulation like with the original copper telephone push to get services expanded, there isn't a profit in doing so. It doesn't have to be wire, but even wireless has limited value.
Companies concentrate on relatively few places to expand. Verizon has limited FIOS. perhaps thinking that wireless is better, but I suspect it will be a long time before large scale 20MBps is available wirelessly to most of the country. I could be wrong, but cable/fiber people laugh at investing in many places where you don't have high densities of people. Even then they minimally invest to get some people high speed, but others with lots of contention.