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Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

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Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#91
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you buy Chinese cars without the Multimedia/GPS computer and "phone home" system?

Maybe? But there's honestly not much market for this, as I'd guess less than 1% of the population cares about this. Particularly since they're already carrying a phone anyway.

there isn't a market for barebones for the sake of privacy, but there is a market apparently for 'barebones for the sake of value', which is what the whole Slate truck thing is attacking.

I'm sure a chinese EV group could key in on the same pure-value market if there isn't a group already doing that. 'Golf carts for the street.'

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#92

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.

Memory in particular is something that I've reflected on more than once as having the most impressive gains in computing since I started paying attention to it (networking/USB too, but that doesn't make your computer "faster" in the same way). I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid…

> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.

Over that time CPUs have also increased their instructions per clock by 3 to 4 times, so the comparison is a bit closer than that. 5Ghz in CPUs is also common these days which would make it even closer. RAM has also improved in more than just total size though.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#93
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chip fabrication processes are not fungible: GPUs and CPUs might be made on roughly the same process, but DRAM is not (flash is a different process again, as is power electronics, analog electronics, MEMS, etc. And even within those broader categories there are different variations). While there are some overlaps in machines and techniques, a fab set up for one cannot generally switch to the other, and the economics…

You're not the first person to say so (and I don't mean to dispute it), but I have never been able to find a clear answer for /why/ those processes are incompatible. Is it built in different silicon, is it physical steps that's incompatible (ie its actually incompatible), is it different physical preparations that needs to be made (making it economically infeasible to combine) I cannot help but wonder, even if the an…

To expand a little on this: a chip fabrication process is a series of steps from incoming bare wafers to finished chips (potentially multiple wafers get combined into a finished chip, as well). To build up the physical structure of the chip, there are a series of steps where different materials are deposited or grown on the surface, masked through photolithography, and removed in order to shape the structure of the chip layer by layer. Each of these depends on not just what that layer itself requires (material, thickness, resolution), but also on the layers around it, because these steps are not independent: a lot of process design is in finding a way to construct a given chip that means each step is compatible with the others.

What's more, the configuration and flow of the machines used for each step are quite sensitive: you cannot in general just stand up another fab with the same machines, apply the same settings, and hit go on a new chip design and expect any yield: you need to dial in each step, certainly for each process, and likely for each design. This makes switching things around more difficult as well.

So, while in general a fab will have certain common features: spin coaters, photolithography machines, vapor deposition chambers, ovens, etc, the number and specification of each one will vary based on the process, and a production fab will generally not want to change their process drastically, or even to swap between different designs too often.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#95
post #44

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…

My understanding (which could easily be wrong), is the big difference today is CXL which adds cache coherency on top of pci-e.

Without cache coherency, you have to be more careful about how you use the memory and the performance story is complex. Ram over CXL is going to have worse perf than ram on the cpu memory controller, but there shouldn't be any big gotchas.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#96

Literally the "new old thing": https://www.andysarcade.net/store2/all-other-stuff/vintage-c...

It reminded me more about these kind of things actually: https://www.ebay.com/itm/277636244509 (ISA RAM Expansion Boards from the PC/XT era)

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#98

It will be interesting to see what happens to the consumer electronics market the next few years. Companies are right now gambling that consumers will pay extra because of RAM shortages. I suspect with the cost of everything else rising as well, a large portion of consumers (remember, HN, not everyone makes tech money) will just not be buying new devices for a bit.

I think I'm in this boat. I'm just choosing to interact with technology less. Everything has just gotten more hostile that it has reached a tipping point.

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#99
post #44

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…

30 years ago I remember cards like this to convert 4 30-pin SIMM modules to fit in a 72-pin SIMM slot. https://www.ebay.com/itm/383521792853

Oh, yeah...I remember those. I prolly have one in a box someplace. They were pretty terrible. :-)

Re: Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

#100
post #8

It’d be nice if there were a consumer version of this. I have plenty of old RAM.

The sensibility is a bit different since consumer systems don't really have much bandwidth back to the CPU. Given the current resale prices of DDR4, might as well just sell it and get some NVMe drives.
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