Live data from Hacker News

How DRAM changed the world

micron.com

21–30 of 128 posts

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#21
post #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.

I think 4k is also too much in the vast majority of cases..

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#22
post #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'…

> Going from 8MB to 32MB in the 90s is still comparable to going from 8GB to 32GB today.

This statement makes it difficult to believe you were there.

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#23
post #7
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.

Nah the biggest jump in performance by far was SSDs. It was a huge step so software had no chance to "catch up" initially.

It's happening, Windows gets slower every year to adapt to SSDs.

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#24

"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...

Yes, they record with higher resolutions and then the director and the operateur has greater flexibility later when they realize they need a different framing - or just fixing the cameraman's errors cutting parts of the picture out. They need the extra pixels/captured area to be able to do this.

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#25
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> Going from 8MB to 32MB in the 90s is still comparable to going from 8GB to 32GB today. This statement makes it difficult to believe you were there.

How so?

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going from 8MB to 32MB in the 90s is still comparable to going from 8GB to 32GB today. This statement makes it difficult to believe you were there.

How so?

8GB -> 32GB doesn't really give you a whole lot more than opening more browser tabs or whatnot. Cache some more filesystem into memory I suppose.

8MB -> 32MB enabled entirely new categories of (consumer-level) software. It would be a game changer for performance as you were no longer swapping to (exceedingly slow) disk.

They simply are not comparable, imo. 8MB to 32MB was night and day difference and you would drool over the idea of someday being able to afford such a luxury. 8GB to 32GB was at least until very recently a nice to have for power users.

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#27
post #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 l…

If that's the case, why haven't we switched to SRAM? Isn't it only about 4x the price at any given process node?

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#28
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think 4k is also too much in the vast majority of cases..

It's insufficient for large theaters and barely sufficient for medium theaters. 1080p is plenty for most home theaters (though with the so-so quality of streaming, I wonder to what degree macroblocks are the new pixels)

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#29
post #27
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

If that's the case, why haven't we switched to SRAM? Isn't it only about 4x the price at any given process node?

That 4x the price does also explain why it has not happened.

Re: How DRAM changed the world

#30
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so?

8GB -> 32GB doesn't really give you a whole lot more than opening more browser tabs or whatnot. Cache some more filesystem into memory I suppose. 8MB -> 32MB enabled entirely new categories of (consumer-level) software. It would be a game changer for performance as you were no longer swapping to (exceedingly slow) disk. They simply are not comparable, imo. 8MB to 32MB was night and day difference and you would drool…

Yeah, the equivalent nowadays would be like going from 256mb to 16gb.

Even most AAA games will still run on 8gb ram just fine.

Post reply on HN