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Now to rip RAM off PCs being sent to the landfills.
Not terribly exciting at 1/10th the bandwidth and double the latency. That's a heavy price to pay to use old DDR4 memory.
In the future, hardware is only for big companies to own. At least it seems we're heading that way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
observation that I've noticed recently: what's with wikipedia downsizing the hell out of images site wide? Every image I look at is garbage and I have to dig through multiple links to find the original.
All this goes to my "world has gone insane over IP law" bucket. Similar to people disallowing their games being streamed or even shared in screenshots.
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…
Now to rip RAM off PCs being sent to the landfills.
I fail to see why you couldn't also literally just stack RAM chips themselves on top of each other. If it works for stupid consoles (see NES/Dreamcast/PS1/PS2 hacking of recent), PCs should be no different.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source paper linked is https://aisystemcodesign.github.io/papers/isca26/vistara_cam... From a quick skim, you could think of this as roughly equivalent to shoving a large amount of DDR4 on a PCIe card and using it as a swap space. It's more sophisticated (see CXL protocol), but that gives you an idea of the tradeoffs. It seems there is some OS-level support for moving hot/cold pages between the main fast DRAM and the…
> and contains significant embedded carbon emissions Hi - thanks for the insightful comment - could you please expand on the above? Genuinely curious :)
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...
In the future, hardware is only for big companies to own. At least it seems we're heading that way.
> In the future, hardware is only for big companies to own. At least it seems we're heading that way. China is desperate to sell anything to... everyone. If there's a market, they'll eventually be there to fill it. It took them decades for cars, but now they did it. For RAM, CXMT went from 20 000 wafers per month to... 240 000 wafers per month in something like two years. And they're extending capacity massively now.…