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Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

theregister.com

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

#121

Post by kergonath »

nottorp wrote: post #113
bartread wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny... I enjoyed Neuromancer, although I didn't read it until about 15 years ago. And, yeah, the memory thing hasn't aged well. Thing is, 1984 was a funny time in computing, particularly when you consider the kind of computers normal people had access to. At that point even things like PCs and the new Mac had 128 or 256K of RAM[0], so I get that 3MB must have seemed like an ocean of memory at the time. And, re…

> But then Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right? Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars? > And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing about memory when, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic. He seems to understand humans. Gibson's world and Brunner's S…

> Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars?

Yeah. I don’t think he was a technophile himself. Which might have helped him because he was not trying to be realistic. But at the same time there are things he understood deeply.

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

#122

Post by undersuit »

kjs3 wrote: 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…

Cost for me. I wanted a Gigabyte I-ram but it was too expensive when I only had one 512MB DDR stick after upgrading to 4GB of DDR2. I bought a 60GB Sandforce SSD that fulfilled that speed gap.

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

#124

Post by jayd16 »

kjs3 wrote: 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…

Nvme drives already max out the 4x pcie lanes they get. You'd basically need to use the GPU slot to do better and even then you could do it with SSDs. M.2 break out cards are pretty common.

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

#125

Post by thewebguyd »

jonathanlydall wrote: post #89
snowwrestler wrote: post #55

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…

> Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase

This was the most impactful upgrade/breakthrough for me. The first time I put even a SATA SSD in my PC at home I was completely blown away. It still blows my mind somewhat the amount of compute I have sitting on my desk though, both in terms of memory and CPU/GPU power, but that move from spinning rust to solid state was huge.

Then Apple did to me again with the M1 launch and NVMe speeds that made swapping nearly imperceptible.

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

#126

Post by wmf »

kjs3 wrote: 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…

Honestly DIMMs don't really fit on PCI cards and a boatload definitely doesn't fit.

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

#129

Post by gchamonlive »

snowwrestler wrote: post #55

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.

Can't you just read "3 MB of RAM" as a large amount of some scarce tech resource and move on?

What if you got a on-chip compression algorithm so advanced that you can fit a world in a few MB and now with corporations controlling memory distribution, 3MB of high compression memory is highly valuable in the black market.

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

#130

Post by mNovak »

snowwrestler wrote: post #55

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.

If I recall correctly, Gibson had never even used a computer at the time of writing Neuromancer, so that's perhaps not shocking.
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