61–70 of 240 posts
Why not go directly to the source article that has a lot more details? https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/29/zuck-saves-me...
It is amazing how this is attributed to "zuck", like he actually knows these things.
I have always wondered why there was never a big market[1] for "cheap PCI/PCI-X/PCI-e card you can stick a boatload of your old/surplus/n-generation old simms/dimms on and use as swap/slow memory/ram disk/etc". It's rare you can populate a motherboard with a full address space full of 'new' memory, and you can teach kernels to prefer some memory to others because of speed[2], so it seems like a no-brainer. I seem to…
The interesting part of this "RAM crisis" is similar to other fields where a problem results multiple parties looking for alternative solutions. This yields for exciting ideas or workarounds that might result a post-crisis memory boom (hopefully) also for local machines. 1. Lowest, Apple is evaluating new Chinese manufacturer which means change of supply demand if indeed it has reasonable QA. ( https://www.ft.com/con…
> suddenly single channel is 'ok' Single channel RAM surely beats any disk-based swap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody voted for it, that's true. But since reality held closely to it for decades right up to the present, it's reasonable to believe that transistors get smaller and cheaper as time passes.
"Moore's law" is a marketing gimmick. The real physical law that held for decades is Dennard scaling, which stopped to apply already in 2006 once transistors got too small so short channel effects and gate leakage kicked in.
https://www.andysarcade.net/store2/all-other-stuff/vintage-c...
It’d be nice if there were a consumer version of this. I have plenty of old RAM.
Gigabyte had a ram disk addin card years ago. Not exactly the same but since it's presented as a storage device you could use it as OS swap space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM
At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer , the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.