121–130 of 355 posts
Note that it won't help you if your workload makes use of all your RAM at once.
If you have a bunch of stuff running in the background it will help a lot.
I get 2 to 3 compression factor at all times with zstd. I calculated the utility to be as if I had 20GB extra RAM for what I do.
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Not really new, Nvidia's GTX 1070 launched in 2016 with 8 GB of VRAM and they've been slow walking VRAM increases for the last decade. Today's RTX 5060 has 8 GB for basically the same price that the 1070 did. For $650 you can go up to 12 GB in the 5070, if you want 16 GB it's $1000 for the 5070 Ti, or hundreds more than that for the 5080. I know there's inflation and $380 in 2016 was more money than it is today, but…
1060 6GB here. Figured the headroom would get me a couple extra years out of it. At this rate I’m wondering if the card is going to outlast the concept of owning graphics cards. Partly because, as you mention, maybe NVIDIA will stop selling them. Partly because, maybe APUs will get good enough…
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The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run. Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.
There's a few things to note here: 1) Prices aren't returning to "normal". The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it 2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome. If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about co…
You can't reshore domestic manufacturing without creating legions of desperate workers with no other choice but to accept minimum wage factory jobs.
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> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it I disagree. Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to…
> In 5-10 years and waiting for 5-10 yrs for a lower price is a long wait for consumers. If food prices were high, would you say to the starving person to wait for 5-10yrs for food?
I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM. RAM isn't going anywhere, all of modern compute uses it. This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it.
There exists domestic supply, it's just not scaled up: https://www.goodram.com/en/ You don't see their products in stores too often as they're focused on B2B - particularly the automotive sector. That being said I have a 128GB memory stick from this manufacturer and I hope they make the most out of this windfall.
People is missing the point. Mega-corporations distort the market. This is not capitalism this is old aristocratic ruling by power. If all these monopolies were divided in smaller chunks and regulated to not allow them to abuse that power we will not be here.
This situation is not normal, big tech is currently above the law and above the market economy and if they fail their plan is to make us pay *AGAIN* for their bad decisions. All businesses and individuals are already paying higher prices for big tech folly, we will be left with the bill when the AI boom fails, too.
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> The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it I disagree. Modern RAM is made in fabs, which are ridiculously expensive to manufacture. Modern EUV lithography machines cost around 500M each. They're manufactured by hand. Only one company in the world knows how to…
> Only one company in the world knows how to manufacture them right now. And that company is in Europe, isn't it? The EU has a great opportunity to enter the market: it's a high-tech manufacturing job, not something that requires lots of cheap labor.
I had my formative years in programming when memory usage was something you still worried about as a programmer. And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. Will we start to actually consider this in software solutions again as a result?
> And then memory expanded so much that all kinds of “optimal” patterns for programming just become nearly irrelevant. I don't think that ever happened. Using relatively sparse amount of memory turns into better cache management which in turn usually improves performance drastically. And in embedded stuff being good with memory management can make the difference between 'works' and 'fail'.
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You're right in terms of fitting your program to memory, so that it can run in the first place. But in performance work, the relative speed of RAM relative to computation has dropped such that it's a common wisdom to treat today's cache as RAM of old (and today's RAM as disk of old, etc). In software performance work it's been all about hitting the cache for a long time. LLMs aren't too amenable to caching though.
AFAIK, you can't explicitly allocate cache like you allocate RAM however. A bit like if you could only work on files and ram was used for cache. Maybe I am mistaken ? (Edit: typo)
Jeez. I'm glad I "splurged" for the 24gb RAM in my macbook air. Should last me a few more years..