I miss RAM. I feel like if you lived through that 90s RAM frenzy, you probably miss RAM too. It was crazy how quickly we move through SDRAM/DDR, prices dropped and you could make real increases in performance year over year for not much money. I'm sure some of it was the software being able to capture the hw improvements, but that certainly was my fav period in tech so far.
How DRAM changed the world
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Re: How DRAM changed the world
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now? Prices have been flat for 15 years and DRAM has been stuck on 10 nm for a while.
That's overstating the flatness of prices. In 2009, the best price recorded here was 10 dollars per gigabyte: https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm Recently DDR4 RAM is available at well under $2/GB, some closer to $1/GB.
Re: How DRAM changed the world
#13I miss RAM. I feel like if you lived through that 90s RAM frenzy, you probably miss RAM too. It was crazy how quickly we move through SDRAM/DDR, prices dropped and you could make real increases in performance year over year for not much money. I'm sure some of it was the software being able to capture the hw improvements, but that certainly was my fav period in tech so far.
Going from 8MB to 32MB in the 90s is still comparable to going from 8GB to 32GB today.
One difference is just that the price isn't dropping at the same rate anymore [1], so it doesn't make as much sense to buy small and re-buy next year when bigger chips are cheaper (they won't be much cheaper).
Another is that DRAM speed is at the top of an S-curve [2], so there's not that same increase in speed year-over-year, though arguably the early 2000's were when speeds most dramatically increased.
[1] https://aiimpacts.org/trends-in-dram-price-per-gigabyte/
[2] http://blog.logicalincrements.com/2016/03/ultimate-guide-com...
Re: How DRAM changed the world
#14The article doesn't properly explain how DRAM is different from SRAM. DRAM has to constantly refresh itself in order not to 'forget' its contents.
Re: How DRAM changed the world
#15I miss RAM. I feel like if you lived through that 90s RAM frenzy, you probably miss RAM too. It was crazy how quickly we move through SDRAM/DDR, prices dropped and you could make real increases in performance year over year for not much money. I'm sure some of it was the software being able to capture the hw improvements, but that certainly was my fav period in tech so far.
RAM speeds are still improving pretty fast. I'm running DDR5 6000 and DDR5 8300 is available. GDDR7 uses PAM3 to get 40Gbps
Re: How DRAM changed the world
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
RAM speeds are still improving pretty fast. I'm running DDR5 6000 and DDR5 8300 is available. GDDR7 uses PAM3 to get 40Gbps
How does that contrast with the increase cas latency in real world terms? (Actually asking, not being combative, I don't know)
Re: How DRAM changed the world
#17"8K video recording" - does anyone really need this? Seems like for negligible gain in quality people are pushed to sacrifice their storage & battery, and so upgrade their hardware sooner...
Re: How DRAM changed the world
#18Dennard scaling for SRAM has certainly halted, as demonstrated by TSMC’s 3nm process vs 5 nm. What’s the likely ETA for DRAM?
Re: How DRAM changed the world
#19"8K video recording" - does anyone really need this? Seems like for negligible gain in quality people are pushed to sacrifice their storage & battery, and so upgrade their hardware sooner...
Re: How DRAM changed the world
#20Dennard scaling for SRAM has certainly halted, as demonstrated by TSMC’s 3nm process vs 5 nm. What’s the likely ETA for DRAM?
DRAM uses a capacitor. Those capacitors essentially hit a hard limit at around 400MHz for our traditional materials a very long time ago. This means that if you need to sequentially read random locations from RAM, you can't do it faster than 400MHz. Our only answer here is better AI prefetchers and less-random memory patterns in our software (the penalty for not prefetching is so great that theoretically less efficient algorithms can suddenly become more efficient if they are simply more predictable).
As to capacitor sizes, we've been at the volume limit for quite a while. When the capacitor is discharged, we must amplify the charge. That gets harder as the charge gets weaker and there's a fundamental limit to how small you can go. Right now, each capacitor has somewhere in the range of a mere 40,000 electrons holding the charge. Going lower dramatically increases the complexity of trying to tell the signal from the noise and dealing with ever-increasing quantum effects.
Getting more capacitors closer means a smaller diameter, but keeping the same volume means making the cylinder longer. You quickly reach a point where even dramatic increases in height (something very complicated to do in silicon) give only minuscule decreases in diameter.