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How DRAM changed the world

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Re: How DRAM changed the world

#11
post #3

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.

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

#12
post #4

Earlier 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.

$1/GB? That's around the price SSDs took over from HDDs...

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#13
post #3

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.

I am confused by this comment. You said "RAM" (contrast to "DRAM" in the article title) but I think you are talking about DRAM sticks? But those have not gone away (other than with some laptops where it's soldered on and not upgradable).

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

#15
post #3

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.

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

#16
post #15

Earlier 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)

Last time I checked, DDR5 and DDR4 latency was basically the same. Very little progress there. May be with integrating DRAM and CPU on the same package, some latency wins will be available just because wires will be shorter, but nothing groundbreaking.

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...

Well for starters 8k video lets you zoom in and crop and still get 4k in the end.

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#18

Dennard scaling for SRAM has certainly halted, as demonstrated by TSMC’s 3nm process vs 5 nm. What’s the likely ETA for DRAM?

5nm can hold roughly a gigabyte of SRAM on a cpu-sized die, that's around $130/GB I believe. At some point 5nm will be cheap enough that we can start considering replacing DRAM with SRAM directly on the chip (aka L4 cache). I wonder how big of a latency and bandwidth bonus that'd be. You could even go for a larger node size without losing much capacity for half the price.

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...

I think the studios and anyone doing video production probably would use a 8k toolchain if possible. As others have pointed out, this lets you crop and modify video while still being able to output 4k without having to upscale.

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#20

Dennard scaling for SRAM has certainly halted, as demonstrated by TSMC’s 3nm process vs 5 nm. What’s the likely ETA for DRAM?

Years ago.

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.

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