I would like to recommend to you John Appleby’s post here on the HANA blog site. While the title suggests the article is about HANA, in fact it is about trends in computing and processors… and very relevant to posts here past, present, and upcoming…
I would also recommend Curt Monash’s site. His notes on Teradata here mirror my observation that a 30%-50% performance boost per release cycle is the target for most commercial databases… and what wins in the general market. This is why the in-memory capabilities offered by HANA and maybe DB2 BLU are so disruptive. These products should offer way more than that… not 1.5X but 100X in some instances.
Finally I recommend “What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory” by Ulrich Drepper here. This paper provides a great foundation for the deep hardware topics to come.
Database computing is becoming a special case, a commercial case, of supercomputing… high-performance computing (HPC) to those less inclined to superlatives. Over the next few years the differentiation between products will increasingly be due to the use of high-performance computing techniques: in-memory techniques, vector processing, massive parallelism, and use of HPC instruction sets.
This may help you to get ready…